First off, I'm extremely happy for our seniors who get to play one more home game on Youngman field this Wednesday. In a strange year in terms of how our schedule worked out with only 5 home games (the last coming on April 17th), it's great that they'll be able to wear the home white's one more time!

As for our selection to the NCAA tourney, we were the recipients of some favorable results over the past few days in the other conference finals which allowed us to snatch up one of the at-large bids. The precedent that has now been set with Bowdoin receiving the at-large a few years ago when they had 5 losses and us this year is that the committee ultimately is looking at strength of schedule. It appears we played the hardest schedule in the country this year in division 3 and heading into the tourney I'm glad we have all of those hard fought games in our hip pocket.

Yesterday was a game of runs by both teams. For those of you who haven't seen Tufts play this year, they are a dynamic transition team and once they get the ball over the midline, they are in attack mode. Their d-middies, long stick middie, even their fogo all will go hard to the cage and are confident with the ball in their stick. They can score in bunches which they did early in the game to take a 7-3 lead.

Our guys battled back and took the lead heading into halftime 8-7. David Hild had a career day with 5 goals and 2 helpers, 4 of which came in the first half. He has turned it on these last few games and hopefully can continue to lead us offensively down the stretch. After David assisted on the first goal of the 2nd half and scored the next one to give us a 10-7 lead, Tufts decided to start shutting him off with a short stick. We would get one more goal from Erich Pfeffer to push the lead to 11-7 before Tufts would go on their last run.

At some point in the 3rd quarter after we took the 4 goal lead our guys started to tighten up a bit. We continued to get stops on defense and outstanding goaltending from Ryan Deane but all of a sudden we could not clear the ball. When we did get the ball over the midline, we couldn't get it in the box, or we would touch it in the box and turn it over immediately. We obviously need to work on our stickwork in the middle of the field but a big case of nerves helped fuel the fire for Tufts and allowed them to score 6 straight to take a 13-11 lead.

We would cut it to a one goal deficit on a great feed from Hild to Tim Cahill on the crease but we couldn't get that last goal to tie it up. We had plenty of chances at the end of the game but couldn't make the plays we needed to down the stretch.

I hope that by playing in the championship game our guys have gained some valuable experience and the next time we're in a position to play with poise and confidence in a pressured situation, we do just that.

Goucher looks to be a very potent offensive team with some young but talented players. It should be a good game up here on Wednesday and I hope we can keep this season going!