Northside continued its winning ways, though it took the Grizzlies most of the game Tuesday to finally finish things off.

Up 2-1 on Little Rock Central, the Grizzlies scored a pair of goals in the final 15 minutes to pull away from the Tigers for a 4-1 win in 7A-Central action at Mayo-Thompson Stadium.

Tuesday’s win gave Northside (14-2, 8-1) its sixth straight win. The Grizzlies also maintained at least a tie for first-place in the 7A-Central with Little Rock Catholic, as those two teams get set for Friday’s showdown in Little Rock.

“A winning streak is always good,” Northside coach Mauricio Maciel said. “You know that you can win games and that the last thing we would want is being on a losing streak heading over to Catholic, so that’s not the case and we’re going to embrace it and hopefully, we can use that momentum to help us at Little Rock on Friday.”

Things started out well for the Grizzlies in the first half, as Cesar Ramirez got the team on the board first with a goal. Then Jason Mendoza followed moments later with a goal to put Northside up 2-0.

“He scored twice last week against Bryant and (Tuesday), there was a good goal from a nice corner kick,” Maciel said of Mendoza’s goal.

But Central got on the board with a goal in the closing minutes of the first half. The score stood at 2-1 throughout most of the second half.

“One thing we continued to remind them is that we knew we were going to outplay this team, but it’s almost like we made it easy on them by relaxing,” Maciel said. “I definitely believe that we relaxed a bit and they almost came back in the game.

“I had no doubt if we played our game, we would be able to come back and beat them convincingly, which we did, but it took us a while. It took us at halftime to wake them up and say, hey, you’ve got to play better.”

With almost 13 minutes left to play, the Grizzlies finally got some breathing room as senior Jesus Rodriguez followed a deflected shot and drilled it back in for a two-goal advantage.

“He’s one of our seniors and we’ve been calling on him to step it up a bit,” Maciel said of Rodriguez. “He’s a good player, and can definitely give us more minutes; he just needs to continue to start pitching in a little bit more.”

Another senior, Kareem Ihmeidan, got the last goal on a header with under three minutes left.

Maciel added the Grizzlies got solid second-half goalkeeping from Chuy Parga, as well as defensive play from senior Alfredo Centeno.

In the girls’ game, Little Rock Central defeated the Northside Lady Bears, 7-1.