Disclosed embodiments provide a technique in which a memory controller determines whether a fetch address is a miss in an L1 cache and, when a miss occurs, allocates a way of the L1 cache, determines whether the allocated way matches a scoreboard entry of pending service requests, and, when such a match is found, determine whether a request address of the matching scoreboard entry matches the fetch address. When the matching scoreboard entry also has a request address matching the fetch address, the scoreboard entry is modified to a demand request.