We got back late last night from spring trip and are coming off of two tough road losses with Williams on the horizon for this Wednesday.

I have to say the trip itself was great, we have always been a bus team and driving the 14 hours down to Virginia with Gary "The Force" Forcier was enjoyable as always.  Some good movies, a few questionable ones (namely Bottle Rocket) and some episodes of Family Guy as fillers.

We arrived in Lexington Monday night, practiced Tuesday in 80 degree weather felt pretty good entering the W&L game. Wednesday was sunny and 85 right until game time when thunderstorms rolled in and delayed the game for 2 hours.  We did our full warm up and even played a few minutes of the game before being sent back into the locker room.  We moved the game from their grass field to Astroturf and finished the game from where we had left off.

Both teams traded goals in the first half and went into halftime with the game being 5-5.  The story of this game was our inability to win face offs (we won 5 out of 20), too many penalties on defense (they went 3-4 on man up) and offensively we didn't execute what we set out to do against their defense. 

Their goalie was fantastic and made some great saves to keep us from building momentum.   Overall we played hard, rode well all day but didn't make enough plays to beat a pretty solid W&L team.

The trip back up to Maine also went well, we were able to get a practice in on Friday afternoon up at Colby and once again felt like we were in good shape going into the game Saturday.

And then the game began. 

It was really a story of 3 hard fought, well played quarters by Colby and one quarter when we played the way we are capable of.

Nick Bastis scored the first goal of the day but was subsequently called for an illegal pocket and the goal was wiped off the board.  Colby was man up for 3 minutes (non releasable and scored to go up 1-0.  Soon thereafter, we committed a slash and trip in the same flurry to go 2 men down for a minute.  Colby didn't score on that man up but it certainly put us on our heels and they scored soon thereafter.    We answered back with 2 quick goals to tie the score at 2 a piece.  They would end up scoring the final 2 goals of the quarter to take the lead 4-2 going into the second.   (To give you an idea of how much harder they played  than us in the first quarter they outshot us 16-6, and out groundballed us 14-4) More on that later.

We came out like a different team in the second quarter, we were winning face offs, coming up with every loose ball, making plays on defense, getting looks in transition.....  We outscored them 8-0 in the quarter to take a 10-4 halftime lead.  In that quarter we outshot them 14-3 and out groundballed them 17-7.

In the second half we reverted back to the first quarter in terms of the energy we played with on the field, the tentativeness we showed on defense and once again let the game get away from us. 

Colby scored in some strange ways during their comeback, one time our goalie threw it off an attackman's stick and it ended up in the goal, the following goal occurred when we only had 5 guys on defense after one of our longsticks came off the field thinking we were clearing the ball.  They had a few balls that were stripped/thrown away that they beat us to and made us pay for it, again with guys getting there a split second late because we were watching.  Their 11th goal came after we doubled the ball, had a kid rolling back into the double, had people draped all over him and he shot the ball blindly, backhanded from 8 yards over Palmisano's shoulder.   I can't make this stuff up.

It could be the strangest lacrosse game I've ever been a part of, the disappointing part was that we just let it happen.  I will give the Colby team credit for not giving up and for taking the game away from us.  When you take out the 2nd quarter they outgroundballed us 47-20.

At the end of the day, if we had held on to win this game I don't know if we would have learned as much as we will from a loss.  We are going to have a real gut check this week at Williams on Wednesday. 

Stay tuned...

dc