Soft Pretzel Logic

When the final horn sounded, as the thunder and lightning that took place on the field prepared to give way to the real thing that shook the heavens over University City, neither head coach seemed particularly inclined to come out and state the obvious about what they had just seen.

Northwestern's coach, self-effacing but well aware of the game's history, wouldn't dare say it. Virginia's coach, a more veteran observer of the game, came closer but never quite got there either.

Tonight, Franklin Field bore witness to the arrival of another women's lacrosse dynasty.

After 60 minutes of play that served as a tremendous advertisement for all that is both great and maddening about the sport, the Wildcats stormed the field and hoisted their third straight NCAA championship in the air.

The final score was 15-13, the highest-scoring game in NCAA Tournament history. And unlike the previous record, -- a 14-13 win by Maryland over Georgetown which cemented that team's seventh straight tile and an even loftier place in the record books -- this one didn't require three overtimes.

There was drama from the start to the end. With the majority of the fans in the championship game-record crowd of 6,075 rooting for Virginia, the Cavaliers opened the game by scoring twice in the first 91 seconds of play. But Northwestern was unfazed, and promptly rolled off seven straight goals over the next 14:41.

The fourth was the best of the bunch. Wildcats star Kristen Kjellman picked up a bounce pass (which is a rather difficult thing to pull off in lacrosse) and fired it about 20 yards right into the stick of freshman Katrina Dowd, who was ready at the edge of the crease on the goalkeeper's right side and slammed the ball into the net.

Dowd ended the night with a hat trick, quite the accomplishment for any player in a championship game but even more so for a freshman.

Virginia was stuck in neutral at halftime, having scored three times from free position shots to trail, 11-6. Nonetheless, the first half was everything that people who have believed in lacrosse for far longer than I have love to see in the game.

They say the sport combines the best aspects of soccer and hockey, and tonight you could see why -- lots of pace, crisp passing, great movement by players with and without the ball (especially attackers cutting across the crease to receive passes and shoot) and two teams that used the full width and length of the field to build attacks.

And given Virginia's big comeback two days earlier against Duke, no one dared believe the game was over yet.

The second half had a lot more drama, but a lot less action. Virgina supplied the drama, electrifying the crowd by coming back from 12-7 down to 12-11 with 21:44 to play in the game thanks to -- perhaps not surprisingly -- a free position goal by Blair Weymouth. It's worth noting that Virginia took six free position shots in the game, while Northwestern didn't have any.

Just under a minute later, some good passing in Virgina's end led to a goal for Northwestern's Meredith Frank to make it 13-11. The Wildcats fans started chanting "Frank the Tank!" which I found quite funny, given Drexel fans' use of the same chant for Frank Elegar. Not that they had any reason to understand.

With 16:25 left, Ashley McCulloch cut the deficit to one goal again with a great quickstick shot -- the lacrosse equivalent of hockey's one-timer -- on a pass from Devon, Pa. native Megan Havrilla.

From then on, though, Northwestern really imposed its style of play. Sick of letting Virginia run them ragged, the Wildcats dramatically slowed the pace down. After a passing sequence that lasted nearly two minutes, Hilary Bowen made a quick cut across the net from right to left with the ball and scored, making it 14-12. Megan O'Malley scored with a similar cutting run at the other end a few minutes later to make it 14-13, but that would be Virginia's last goal.

This is where Northwestern really ground the game to a halt, passing the ball around 25 or so yards from goal for a few minutes without any seeming intention to take it to the net. It felt like some mirror image of the Italian soccer style called catenaccio, in which the defense basically possesses the ball for as long as possible so that the other team's offense couldn't have it. This was like that, except run by the offense.

Virginia countered this by employing what I would call the "student body at the top of the goal area" defense. It's basically what it sounds like -- put all the field players in a line at the top of the arc and just have them stand there for as long as Northwestern doesn't do anything.

Well, Northwestern finally did something, except it led to more of nothing. Bowen got the ball and took it behind the net and basically stood back there cradling it for almost three minutes. The fans got sick of this, and being in Philadelphia, they did the only thing the could -- boo Northwestern. Loudly and for quite a while at that.

Virginia didn't apply any ball pressure, which had just about everyone in the stadium quite confused. But in the eyes of Cavaliers coach Julie Myers, it was actually a sign of respect for Bowen's talent.

"That was a great delay on their part, to put one really dominant player back behind who could take you on in the crease right- or left-handed while they put everyone up in a stack," she said. "We knew what they were doing, but the risk of going back and forcing a great crease challenge, to come up and take that crease challenge, you've got a pretty good chance of going down another goal."

Myers turned out to be right. After Bowen finally passed the ball, Virginia goalie Kendall McBrearty saved the resulting shot.

But a few minutes later, after a no-call on Northwestern that had Myers furious, Virginia was whistled for a foul that was also a bit questionable. Northwestern capitalized, and with 2:29 left on the clock, Dowd finished off the night's scoring with her third goal.

I mentioned at the beginning of the post that neither coach really said that this Northwestern team has built a dynasty, even if everyone else in the sport is convinced of it.

"Are they as good as Maryland? Very similar," Myers said. "Their true force, their strength is their attack. They just hope to outscore other teams, so I think it's very similar to Maryland in that."

Northwestern coach Kelly Amonte Hiller played on the team that won the first two of Maryland's seven straight titles. Even if she knew the question was coming, it was still humbling to have to answer it.

"I can't compare myself to Cindy Timchal -- she's one of the greatest coaches ever," Hiller said of her former mentor, the winningest coach in the sport's history. "I think that we've developed something special here at Northwestern. I think we have our own little niche in the Chicago area and I think ours is different from Maryland's, but we're just excited about what we've established at Northwestern thus far, and we're looking forward to the future."

That future will include Bowen, whose five goals in the championship game's won her Most Outstanding Player honors despite the jeers. She's only a sophomore now. But it won't include Kjellman, Northwestern's best player, who graduates this year.

Kjellman was equally selfless about her place in lacrosse lore -- but her coach was not.

"She kicks my ass in practice," Hiller said.

Point taken, and history certainly made by Kjellman, Hiller and the rest of the team.

UPDATE: The Inquirer has posted Shannon Ryan's obit story.

The Associated Press just confirmed in an alert that Howard Porter died today.

ESPN.com had reported it earlier this afternoon but I never saw the story on any of the actual wires, which was why I waited to post something until now. and at about the same time I saw Villanova's press release.

I will post more information as I get it.

You probably know that Australians produce really, really good athletes in just about every sport imaginable. Ian Thorpe dominated Olympic swimming for years. The country's national rugby and cricket teams are among the world's elite, and the national soccer team made the knockout stages of last year's World Cup with much fanfare.

The women's national basketball team, led by Lauren Jackson, won a silver medal in the 2004 Olympics, Heck, there are even Australians scattered across a bunch of Major League baseball teams, and let's not forget the most famous Australian of all in American sports -- new Eagles punter Saverio Rocca.

Now they're coming for lacrosse, and one of the country's best current players will be in the spotlight tonight.

Northwestern midfielder Hannah Nielsen might only be a sophomore, but she's already a big part of the Wildcats' attack. And as I found out on Friday, her being in the Final Four is such a big deal that her mother and club coach flew here from Adelaide, Australia for the occasion.

"It’s tiring, it’s expensive, but it’s worth every dollar to watch her play in an amazing team," Vicki Nielsen said as her daughter's team romped past Penn.

Vicki admitted, though, that the sport has very little national resonance back home.

"It’s really a small sport, but the girls who play it play it well," she said. "They get quite a bit of recognition in the local papers and we watch the American version as well."

Hannah's coach at the Brighton Bombers club, Tim Dickson, agreed.

"Those who are involved love it, but it’s very low-key," he said. "If you didn’t know about it, you probably wouldn’t know it existed."

But sitting right in front of Dickson and Nielsen was an Australian who knows plenty about lacrosse -- former Maryland star and current Terrapins assistant Jen Adams.

"It’s one of those sports at home that’s very close-knit," she said. It’s a family sport, a small community, but I think we have a lot of talent and we breed that talent well. The older players take the younger players under their wing, which is really important."

Adams freely admits that she recruits Australian players when she can -- including current Terrapins junior midfielder Casey Magor, who is also from Adelaide.

"I’m always looking out for the next top [Australian] recruit, or any other country for that matter," she said. "But I like the pipeline, I like my Aussies, and hopefully I’ll find a couple more to come over."

If you work in the media, you don't normally have to look too far to find a member of the so-called "Northwestern Mafia." And should you pin down one of these not-very-mysterious characters for a few minutes, you won't have to talk to them for long to get them to say something about the current state of athletics at their alma mater.

Chances are, that something won't be too kind. In the revenue sports, the men's basketball team is the only team in the Big Ten never to have made the NCAA Tournament, and the football team hasn't been to the Rose Bowl since 1995. The Wildcats have been Big Ten co-champions twice since then, but never got the trip to Pasadena, and only finished above .500 in one other season between then and now.

But with the women's lacrosse team about to play for its third consecutive national title, the amount of purple on display in newsrooms has gone up just a bit lately. And a team that plays a distinctly un-Midwestern sport has the rapt attention of the fans in Chicagoland.

"It’s brought a lot of excitement to the university and the athletic program," Northwestern Athletic Director Mark Murphy told me Friday night. "I think within the athletic department, it’s been a real positive sign because it’s showed our other teams they can win."

Now, you might say that it's easier -- and from an administrative perspective, that can easily mean cheaper -- to win a championship in a non-revenue sport if you're a school with the kinds of academic standards Northwestern has. As John Smallwood noted in Friday's Daily News, a lot of schools with smart students and less-than-stellar football teams have found success in lacrosse.

Granted, because the program is fully funded, Northwestern spends $200,000 per lacrosse player on scholarship. Nonetheless, from the simple perspective of roster size, the 20-30 players on a lacrosse team costs less than the 100-plus on a football team, and lacrosse hasn't had the kind of facilities arms race (yet?) that football and basketball teams are currently waging.

At a school whose business program knows quite a bit about how to make profits, maybe it's not much of a surprise that the biggest return has come from one of the athletic department's smaller investments.

Brian Earl and Mason Rocca, meet Jess Wasilewski and Megan Havrilla.

The latter two names, both graduates of Conestoga High School, scored the three biggest goals of the night in Virginia's absolutely stunning 14-13 win over Duke.

You might remember that Earl and Rocca were on that Princeton team that so famously erased a 33-9 halftime deficit to beat Penn, 50-49, at the Palestra in 1999. Well, tonight, the Cavaliers were down 8-3 at the half and 13-4 with 20:46 to play in the game.

But after that, Virginia made this writer look pretty dumb for using the word deluge to describe Northwestern's first half against Penn.

Starting at 17:09 to go in the game, the Cavs scored five times in a span of just under three minutes to cut the deficit to 13-9. And they kept chipping away, ever so slowly. Wasilewski made it 13-11 with 9:37 to play, then Havrilla cut the deficit to one goal 39 seconds later.

The big cluster of orange-clad Virginia fans sitting at the top of the lower deck let out a roar so loud that it genuinely startled the media in the press room, many of whom were frantically writing stories to make deadline.

Virginia continued to possess the ball and storm Duke's net, and Havrilla tied the game with 4:47 to go. When Duke's Rachel Sanford was assessed a yellow card with 2:59 remaining, the fans around me started to realize that Virginia actually had a very good chance of winning this thing.

The ball kept staying in Virginia's sticks, and after Duke called timeout with just under a minute left, the Cavaliers set up to grab the win. The clock kept moving, and with nine seconds to go, Wasilewski cut inside and fired her team to victory.

It added up to ten straight Virginia goals, the largest comeback in the history of NCAA Tournaments in women's lacrosse.

Cue bedlam, and even more at the final horn as coach Julie Myers threw all the papers in her hand up in the air and ran around as fast as any of her players had all night.

"The thing about me is, I always believe that it will never rain on us and we will always win games," Myers said after the game. "It's not that I don't recognize the deficit or the trouble that we may be in -- I may be naive, but I'm a full believer in the things that I work with."

Wasiliewski was just as happy.

"I heard another attack say, 'You've got to go, you've got to go,'" she said. "So I just took it and shot, and hoped for the best."

"It's unbelievable," she continued. "Obviously it's an honor to be in the Final Four, and to have it in my hometown with friends and family is one thing, and to score the winning goal is just amazing."

Havrilla admitted that being at Franklin Field "definitely had something to do with how I was playing."

"It's just an amazing feeling, and being at home in Philly makes it all the better," she said.

I tried to get Havrilla and Wasilewski to admit the sort of obvious, which is that they beat Duke, of all teams, in the national semifinals -- an ACC rival, a team that beat them 19-18 earlier in the season in Charlottesville, and it just being Duke. But Havrilla didn't really go for it.

"They're a great team -- I know a lot of their players," Havrilla said.

Wasilewski did, though.

"Revenge was a big part of it," she said. "The fact that it was an ACC team, that we were seeded together in the Final Four, to get to a national championship game -- everything just stacked up together to make it an incredible win."

Myers was asked a bunch of questions about Northwestern after the game. There's not much of a point in going through all her answers, but she did quite conveniently sum up everything.

"Northwestern is good," she said. "They're good. They were good then. They're good now, they will probably be good tomorrow, on Sunday, next year, and probably for five more years."

Myers also said that she made sure her team got to see some of the sights in town.

"After we had our shootaround today, we went to the Art Museum and everyone ran up the steps. When you're in Philadelphia, you do try to take it in and enjoy things here."

That includes a certain culinary delicacy that one would have to think isn't exactly good for a well-trained athlete's body.

"We're not great eaters, so certainly, they will have a cheesesteak," Myers said. "We're not afraid."

That didn't take long.

Well, okay, so the game was scoreless for the first 4:27, and Northwestern led only 1-0 after 22 minutes and change.

But after that, the deluge. The Wildcats scored nine more times before Penn got on the board, including an 8-0 halftime advantage, and that was basically that. The final score was 12-2, and Northwestern will play for its third straight national championship on Sunday.

So much for the buzz in the crowd, at least the part that wasn't rooting for Northwestern. And I have to say, there were far more people in the crowd of 6,428 rooting for Penn than I expected. It's certainly the first time in a long time I've seen a pep band at a non-basketball Final Four.

As I watched the demolition, I thought of the 1979 men's basketball Final Four, the last time a Penn team faced a Big Ten team at this stage of an NCAA Tournament. That Quakers team was really a Cinderella, even if it had a lot of respect nationally -- a 9-seed that ousted overwhelming favorites St. John's and North Carolina to make it to the big stage. In this tournament, Penn was the 4-seed, and beat the 13 and the 5-seeds to get here.

Still, the basketball game was 50-17 at halftime and 101-67 at the end. The opponent, Michigan State was led by some guy named Magic Johnson. You might have heard of him. Northwestern had Aly Josephs, who scored five goals, and Kristen Kjellman, whose hat trick gave her the all-time record for goals in the NCAA Tournament.

Now, as you might notice from looking at my headshot, I wasn't around that year. So, to find a better perspective, I turned to a guy who was in Salt Lake City that day, longtime Penn statistician Stu Suss.

He called the comparison "a little unfair to the basketball team."

"As ugly as it was in the first half, [the 1979 team] actually played well," Suss said. "They got all sorts of open shots, missed a bunch of layups. It wasn't as clear until around 10 minutes in that it was going to be a domination."

Interesting, then, that Northwestern only out-shot Penn 21-20, and that the teams were tied at 15 ground balls and eight draw controlls (faceoffs) apiece. But that's the difference between the top team in the country and the rest of the field.

Yet given Northwestern's fast rise to prominence in college lacrosse, Suss said Penn is capable of something similar.

"It's a tremendous accomplishment for a program that doesn't have a history and tradition to crack the Final Four," he said. "It doesn't appear to be a George Mason kind of thing where you say this is a one-shot deal and their moment in the sun has come and gone. You have some reason to believe this coaching staff has put together the foundation for a nationally competitive team for a while."

Despite that, there was a definite air of finality in the press conference room after the game. No matter what they told themselves before the game, you could tell that Penn's three leading seniors -- attack Chrissy Muller and defenders Karen Jann and Sarah Eastburn -- sensed the full force of the fact that their college careers were over.

"It is bittersweet," a quite emotional Muller said. "Walking in here, Karen said, 'Don't think about this game, think about everything we've done. "I'm just really sad to leave, and that it had to end this way."

"This was a fantastic experience for all of us, but especially us seniors," Eastburn said. "We came into this program our freshman year with [coach] Karin [Brower] instilling in us this belief that we could be here [and] we could win a national championship, and I think the four seniors truly believed that."

I'm not going to write anything else today (seriously) so that this post stays at the top of the blog.

-- Dana Pennett O'Neill's story in this morning's Daily News

-- The video highlight clip that was referred to in this morning's Inquirer

-- My initial post about him and what this all means to me

UPDATE: News that will certainly be of interest to Villanova fans, and maybe Sixers fans as well: Georgetown forward Jeff Green will stay in the NBA Draft, but center Roy Hibbert will go back to school for his senior year.

I know that a lot of the traffic on here over the next day or two is going to be about Howard Porter, and in the morning I'll stick a post at the top that refers to everything you need to know about it. But in the meantime, the coaches of the four teams in the women's lacrosse final four held a teleconference today, and there were some good anecdotes in it, including one about my favorite subject...

This Final Four is going to have a distinct Philadelphia flavor to it not only because of its location, but because of the players involved. You would expect Penn to have a bunch of local kids, and they do, but Duke also has three and Virginia has four. In a blatant attempt to get a few more hits from the suburbs, those players are:

Duke

-- Christie Barnes (Freshman, Wayne, Pa./Radnor)
-- Sara Giedgowd (Freshman, Wayne, Pa./Conestoga)
-- Michelle Menser (Senior, Wayne, Pa./Radnor)

Virginia

-- Megan Havrilla (Senior, Devon, Pa./Conestoga)
-- Megan O’Malley (Junior, Moorestown, N.J./Moorestown)
-- Katie Shannon (Sophomore, Downingtown, Pa./Downingtown West)
-- Jess Wasilewski (Senior, Paoli, Pa./Conestoga)

Both coaches are also from the Philadelphia region -- Duke's Kerstin Kimel is from Havertown, Pa., and Virginia's Julie Myers is from Bryn Mawr. Two of Kimel's uncles, Ed Kimel and Chris Manning, played basketball at Villanova and what was then Philadelphia Textile, respectively.

"The opportunity to play at Franklin Field is a really special one," Kimel said."I think going there a lot as a kid, whether it was for Penn football games or the Penn Relays, to go back there and have the opportunity to compete for a national championship in that venue is really, really exciting."

There's a joke in there somewhere about people actually going to Penn football games... but we move on to the most important quote that came out of the teleconference. Yes, I buried the lede. So be it.

In what must surely be a blatant attempt to win the affection of this writer, who has historically not rooted for Duke sports teams (to put it nicely), Kimel relayed the following anecdote about how her team got ready for its second-round game against Johns Hopkins.

With classes over for the year, the senior class "made homemade soft pretzels and gave them to all the kids on Friday night before our Hopkins game, with a note on them saying, ‘This is from the seniors, and we promise we’ll buy you the real thing next week.’"

Now, I've been to Durham before. I know there isn't all that much to do in the town, and I know that Duke kids are pretty smart. But that's impressive. And I guarantee they'll find real good ones right in the stadium over the weekend.

The other blatant angle in all of this is the success of both the men's and women's teams at Duke this season a year after their worlds were turned upside down by the rape scandal and the circus that came with it.

"In the last year, a lot of different things have happened for the good and for the better here at Duke," Kimel said. "I think that there’s definitely been a real connection made between our teams in the support that both teams give each other both on and off the field."

As an example of that bond, Kimel said that her team got quite the luxurious view of the men's team's second-round game.

"We kind of came in and made ourselves at home in his office this weekend, with his big screen TV, to watch them beat Carolina," she said.

I couldn't help noting the use of the word "his," but then again, Kimel hasn't left to take a job elsewhere the way women's basketball coach Gail Goestenkors did back in March when she left Duke to take over at Texas.

To say that Northwestern coach Kelly Amonte Hiller knows a lot about Penn's team would have to be an understatement. Hiller saw the Quakers at the beginning of this season, and witnessed firsthand the beginnings of the program's rise to prominence as an assistant at Brown University from 1997 to 1998.

Penn coach Karin Brower has "just done a phenomenal job, really energizing the program," Hiller said. "She’s done a great job recruiting, getting the right kids in, and having them buy into the system that she uses.”

As for this year's edition, Hiller believes that "Penn has gotten better every single day of the season, and I think as a team they’ve gelled and they obviously showed this past weekend against Maryland that they can overcome deficits, they can win in any way.“

We'll see, though, if the Quakers' improvement leads to a better score than the 13-4 trouncing they suffered in Evanston back in March.

Furthering the close ties between the various programs is the fact that Hiller was a freshman at Maryland in 1993, which was Kimel's senior year in College Park.

"Kelly was my recruit, she stayed with me on her recruiting visit," said Kimel. "1993 was the first year while I was at Maryland that we didn’t make it to a championship game, and I think that sat with Kelly and [her teammates], and it really motivated them throughout their careers.”

And finally, no matter how much you or I care about lacrosse, Hannah Nielsen's mother must care about it a whole lot. She's flying in for the weekend from Adelaide, Australia.

I wonder if she knows that the Australian national rugby league team once played at Franklin Field.

Friend of the blog Mark Greenspan sent along this clip of Howard Porter's Villanova team in action from his archive of old Big 5 footage.

Okay, I think I was able to fix the junk problem without requiring TypeKey registration. So that should make commenting easier.

I didn't write about this yesterday because the initial story I was sent was just a few lines of wire copy. I figured at the time -- and I mean this sincerely -- that it was something that had already come and gone in the news cycle and that as such it wouldn't do me any good to write about it.

I sure was wrong about that.

Not because the story landed on the back page of the Daily News this morning, but because I didn't realize how big the shockwaves would be here.

Of course I knew that Porter is arguably the best player in Villanova history, and I still remember quite clearly the footage I saw of Porter's great duel with Ken Durrett that aired in the Palestra movie that came out over the winter.

Then I read Dana Pennett O'Neil's story in the Daily News, and the full gravity of the thing slammed me like I was standing in the way of him driving to the basket -- specifically, that he might die from the brain damage he suffered after being assaulted over the weekend.

You can probably tell from my headshot that I wasn't around here, or anywhere else on earth, in 1971. I've tried very hard in my time covering the Big 5 to learn as much of its history as I can, and I'd like to think I have a pretty decent idea of what went on before I got to Philadelphia.

One of the reasons that I'm so glad there's a full round robin now is that a new generation of fans has been introduced to what City Series basketball is about -- the full gyms, the noise, the color, the tough defense, the bragging rights -- even if the players are different and the spotlight isn't as bright as it used to be.

But obviously, I never saw Howard Porter, or Ken Durrett, or (perhaps being too honest) even Pepe Sanchez play in person.

So I have a really profound appreciation for Rich Hofmann's column this morning, because he wrote the perfect thing to sum the feelings up:

I never saw Howard Porter play in the Palestra, but I can close my eyes and see him. You know what I mean?

I think so. I hope so. I think I met Porter, and maybe interviewed him, at the Big 5's 50th anniversary banquet. I really hope I did that. I know I met and interviewed Paul Arizin, and when he died, as sad and sudden as that was, I at least took solace in having done so.

I know what Howard Porter looks like, and I remember that fabulous brown suit he was wearing (in that picture), and how many people were drawn to him... and I hope I did talk to him, because if we're about to lose another legend, we'd better all make sure we have our memories well-preserved.

What are your memories of him?

Okay, folks, here's a nice little off-season trivia challenge for you. Will 7-foot-3 La Salle recruit Jameson Keefe be the tallest player ever in the Big 5 when he arrives at 20th and Olney?

Thus far, with some help from Daily News assistant managing editor Pat McLoone, I have him tied with Villanova's Tom Greis, and just edging out the late Robert Liburd of Temple at 7-foot-2 and 7-footers even Tom Piotrowski of La Salle and Conor Tolan of Penn.

If you know of anyone taller, let me know and I'll be glad to give you credit. In the meantime, a few national odds and ends...

ESPN.com's Andy Katz reports that Kentucky wants to get out of a game this coming season against UMass at the New Garden in Boston, and is willing to send a $50,000 check to Amherst to do so... make that did so already. UMass AD John McCutcheon. says in the press release that "it is very unprofessional to treat a fellow institution in this fashion."

Now, I'll grant that not-as-Big-as-it-used-to-be Blue has games next season against UNC and Louisville at home; plays in a Coaches vs. Cancer Classic that also includes UConn, Oklahoma and Memphis; and goes to Indiana and Houston, the latter of which will make new coach Billy Gillespie happy.

But UMass loses Rashaun Freeman, Stephane Lasme and James Life going into next year, and the school had already sold 7,000 tickets for the game. So whether or not Kentucky wants out of that game for fear of losing it -- a claim I am always happy to make on behalf of lesser schools who lose home games against bigger schools even if it isn't true -- it seems to me the Minutemen are right to complain.

Also, Cornell forward Geoff Reeves' passport was one of a few valuable objects stolen from the Cornell locker room on Saturday, just a few days before the team leaves for a 10-day trip to France on Wednesday. That's not good, whether you're an Ivy League team or not. If you know where it is, get that thing overnighted to Ithaca, N.Y., if you don't mind.

Even though I consider Penn's women beating Maryland to be at least a mild upset, everyone at least expected the 4-seed Quakers to be serious Final Four contenders. They've been ranked in the top five for most of the season, ran the table in the Ivy League, had the 5-seed Terrapins at Franklin Field, had the incentive of playing the Final Four at home, and so on.

But what the Delaware men did yesterday down in Annapolis is really stunning. The 15-seed Blue Hens, who stunned 2-seed Virginia in the first round, upended 10-seed Maryland-Baltimore County (who themselves knocked off 7-seed Maryland in the first round) yesterday to advance to the Final Four in Baltimore on Saturday. The Terriers certainly provided easier opposition than the Cavaliers, but that's the second time this year the CAA has made national headlines in lacrosse after Drexel stunned U-Va at the beginning of the season.

(It's also the third time the CAA has knocked an ACC big boy off a lofty perch this year if you count national hero Eric Maynor's game-winning basket against Duke in the NCAA men's basketball Tournament. But I bet you the ACC still refuses to take the CAA seriously.)

Awaiting in M&T Bank Stadium will be Johns Hopkins, the Baltimore superpower that even some people who don't know what a lacrosse stick looks like might have heard is really good at the sport. And probably a good 20,000 or so of the Blue Jays' closest friends among a crowd likely to set yet another record for Final Four attendance.

That number will surely be helped by the other semifinal, in which the top-ranked team in the polls, Cornell, will face the tournament's No. 1 seed, Duke. The Big Red have had a season sort of similar to the year the St. Joe's basketball team ran the table and was atop the polls despite skeptics' claims that they didn't have enough quality wins.

Of course, the Blue Devils will get the lion's share of the attention, and with good reason. You can bet it will become the biggest story of all from this spring college sports season if they win it all.

I would like to begin this post with the following premise: anything I write on this blog between now and the end of the summer, if not longer, is irrelevant compared to whatever the Phillies and Eagles do. One can easily argue that anything I ever write is irrelevant compared to those two teams, the Eagles in particular.

One can also argue, though I don't believe this at all, that fans of individual City Six schools don't care all that much about what the other city schools do. I happen to think that the best thing about the nature of this region's college sports teams is that their fan bases do all pay attention to the other teams to some extent.

Nonetheless, I'm ready to accept the notion that this post is about something that only a sliver of the people who read this blog care about, and I say that knowing that one of the things I really want to do with this blog is to write about stuff that doesn't get attention from the main media outlets in the region.

So you've probably figured out by now that the something in question is the Penn women's lacrosse team's 9-7 win over Maryland this afternoon that put the Quakers in the final four of the NCAA Tournament, which will take place at Franklin Field this coming Friday.

In the name of transparency, I will admit that lacrosse is a sport about which I know a few things, but not nearly as much as basketball and football. Nonetheless, I ask you to consider the following storylines, and I ask you do to so making the most honest effort you can to ignore the specific team involved:

-- The rather obvious one, that a Philadelphia college sports team is not only playing in the Final Four of its sport but is doing so on its home field.

-- The fact that said team beat arguably the most dominant team in the history of women's college lacrosse to get to the Final Four.

-- The fact that said team came back from a 4-0 deficit to go up 9-6, then gave up a goal with just over four minutes to play, prompting this writer to say out loud in the press box that he wondered whether we were about to see a classic Philadelphia sports collapse (to be polite), if we hadn't seen one already.

-- And finally, that the game-tying goal (at 5-5) and the subsequent goal (which gave Penn a lead it never relinquished) were scored not only by two of the team's top attackers, but by two Philadelphia-area natives.

If similar things had happened in basketball, or (heaven forbid, given the teams around here not named Penn State) football, it would be a huge deal. As it stands, given that the Phillies are losing 13-2 as I write this post, I find Penn's win today at least worth of attention on here.

"It makes it that much more important, more special" to be from this area, said senior attack Chrissy Muller, who is from Rydal, Pa., to be specific, attended Mount St. Joseph's Academy and scored the game-tying goal today. "I think Philadelphia is a great area for lacrosse and women's lacrosse, so I think to have it here, and the accessibility of Franklin Field for everyone to come, all the high schools, it just makes it a lot of fun."

Sophomore attack Becca Edwards, a native of Flourtown, Pa., and graduate of Springfield Township High whose first goal of the day gave Penn a 6-5 lead, concurred.

"Being from this area, it's nice that my high school team will be probably coming and that people who've supported you through it will be able to see you succeed in a big arena."

Then you have the angle of Penn playing Maryland specifically, a team which has 10 national championships to its name, including seven straight from 1995 to 2001. And as I can tell that this post is getting pretty long, I've saved the fun part of this angle for after the jump.

You bet my jaw dropped when I saw the story in today's Daily News that La Salle pulled 7-foot-3, 290-pound Jameson Keefe. I had too much stuff to do today but I intend to find out next week whether he'll be the tallest player in Big Five history.

I'd bet, though, that 6-9, 230-pound Vernon Goodridge, a transfer from SEC power Mississippi State, will have a bigger impact when he becomes eligible. We won't see Keefe this season either, as he's redshirting a year.

Still, the biggest jaw-dropper came on Andy Katz's blog today: La Salle backed out of playing Drexel at the DAC, and Drexel isn't happy about it. Katz also reports that Frank Elegar will play for the Virgin Islands at the Tournament of the Americas in Las Vegas this summer. So if any of you Drexel folks needed another reason to go there, you've got one.

Your thoughts on that Drexel-La Salle tidbit?

Remember Jesse Pellot-Rosa, who had a pretty good career with Virginia Commonwealth's basketball team before graduating this year?

Well, the 6-foot-5, 195-pound guard signed a pro contract.

With the Jets.

For lack of anything better to do at the moment, explain that one.

Pellot-Rosa is the guy in the black No. 23 jersey falling for the fake by Drexel's Dominick Mejia at the DAC this past season.

I'm going to TypeKey-only registration for a while because I'm just getting too many junk comments. If you have trouble registering email me and I'll try to help you through it.

Hey folks,

As I should have expected, my not posting (and your not commenting) has led to an increase in spam comments. The best way to prevent this is for you to register with TypeKey, so that a. your comments can show up automatically and b. I can eventually move to a TypeKey-only commenting system. I don't necessarily want to do that, but it will keep the spam out.

Thanks and enjoy the warm weather.

(Oh, and for those of you who think I only focus on college sports, I'm hosting the Inquirer's Phillies podcast this season. Take a listen and let me know what you think)

I'm looking at the bracket for the NCAA men's lacrosse tournament, and lo and behold, it looks to me like Drexel was the first team left out.

The Dragons are ranked No. 16 in the current coaches' poll. There are 16 teams in the tournament field, and of the top 16 in the poll, only two -- Drexel and No. 12 Bucknell -- aren't there.

The two teams in the field instead are unranked Providence, which won the MAAC and will face No. 1 seed Duke; and 17th-ranked Delaware, which will face No. 2 seed Virginia. Delaware won the CAA.

Now, here's the quiz: how did Delaware win the CAA Tournament? You guessed it: by beating Drexel in the semifinals at Vidas Field. The Blue Hens then beat Towson in the championship game.

So I looked at Maryland-Baltimore County, the 15th-ranked team in the poll and the theoretical No. 10 seed in the tournament. I say theoretical because technically, only the top 8 teams in the field get seeds, but it's not that hard to figure out.

The Retrievers' non-conference wins were over Brown, Air Force, Penn, Ohio State and Towson; they lost at Denver and Maryland. Of those, only Air Force was a road game. Towson and Brown are currently ranked. Ohio State got votes in the latest media poll.

Drexel beat then-No. 1 Virginia in Charlottesville, which you might recall was kind of a big deal (and got me a byline in the Inquirer, which was fun).

The Dragons also beat St. Joe's (who finished higher in the MAAC than Providence, but lost to the Friars in the conference title game), Binghamton, St. John's, Lafayette and VMI, and lost at home to Notre Dame. The St. Joe's and VMI games were on the road.

Seems to me that you have to give the non-conference strength of schedule edge to UMBC, and I'm inclined to think that would still be the case even if St. Joe's had beaten Providence. So perhaps this is where the Dragons' lacrosse story becomes something different from what happened to the basketball team.

The women's tournament draw comes down at 8 tonight. I'll warn you now that I might have to write about Penn, because they've got an automatic bid. But it looks like I'll be able to write about Penn State as well.

Ray Parrillo, Kevin Tatum and Shannon Ryan compile the local coaches' reactions, pretty much all positive, to the decision to move the three-point line back a foot.

But former Philadelphian, known Soft Pretzel Logic reader and CSTV.com men's basketball editor Bryan Graham makes a very interesting point: the ruling could be a big boost to major-conference teams.

He argues that since mid-major upsets are usually keyed by good guards who hit lots of perimeter shots, moving the line back could knock a few of those points off the board and favor the big-time players who are better at making shots from a foot farther back.

Your thoughts?

(Or your tumbleweeds?)

So you've probably read the stories by now about how the NCAA men's basketball rules committee approved moving the three-point line back a foot from its current 19 feet, nine inches to 20 feet, nine inches.

I've thought about it for a while now and I guess I'm okay with it. I actually like the high percentage of three-point shots taken in the college game relative to the pros, as I think it has a lot to do with the emphasis on good shooting in the college game relative to the more drive-to-the-basket style of the NBA.

(Sorry if there are any Phoenix Suns fans out there, but you know you're the exception to the rule.)

Yeah, you get some big guys taking shots from the arc that they shouldn't. But you also get big guys who develop a good shot and add that to their game along with the ability to play the post well. Rob Ferguson and Curtis Sumpter come to mind right away. And I thought I heard about some player on Penn who's a three-point-shooting small forward, but since people think I write about Penn too much I'd better leave Mark Zoller out of this.

(Oops.)

Do I mind having good straight-up post players in the college game? Of course not. But the passing and shooting in college basketball is one of the main reasons why I prefer it so much to the NBA.

Now, having said that, I find a few problems with this particular decision. First is moving the line by a foot specifically. I can't quite figure out why that's the chosen distance, other than moving a foot for a foot's sake. While I don't want the line moved to the NBA distance, I would have rather seen the line be moved to the international distance of 20 feet, 6 inches. I wouldn't necessarily mind the expanded lane either.

If I had my way, I'd probably have the whole floor be the same as the international floor so that might, heaven forbid, help American basketball players become more used to what they'll see when they play at the world championships and the Olympics. I do find it rather embarrassing when the U.S. gets its clock cleaned by teams that play better basketball by teams that know how to pass, shoot, and use the arc and lane better.

Yes, some of this has to do with player selection, both in terms of who the coaches (and sponsors, ahem) pick, and in terms of which players conveniently decide not to play for the national team. But -- forgive me, please? -- I'd rather see the team that represents the country that invented the game be the smarter team on the floor.

(If you're a fan of the English national soccer team, this may sound familiar to you, but that's for another day and another blog.)

This discussion of the international distance brings me to my other complaint with the line change: the decision to not change the women's distance. Which will of course mean there will be two three-point lines on the floor. That isn't the reason why I'm against it, and I will not be drawn into a gender equity argument here or on the comments because gender has nothing to do with any of this, nor should it.

My problem is that the WNBA line is farther out from the college line. And if part of the point of moving the men's line back is to get closer to the professional line (which must surely have something to do with this), then I think the women's committee really ought to think along the same lines.

Now you might be wondering just what the WNBA line distance is. I had to go to Mel Greenberg to find out (and he had to call the league to find out), but I bet it won't surprise you.

It's not the NBA distance of 23 feet, nine inches.

It's 20 feet, six inches.

Sound familiar? Yep, it's the international distance (click here to see what it looks like -- I'd post it directly but it's not Creative Commons-licensed)

So given all of this, it really seems to me that the most logical thing would have been to move both lines to 20 feet 6 inches. The shooters of both genders would still make a reasonable number of shots, and maybe -- maybe -- it would help everyone involved start reconciling some of the differences between American and international basketball before the national team gets embarrassed again.

I really want to hear what you all have to say about this.

Dana Pennett O'Neil of the Daily News reports that sophomore guard Bilal Benn is transferring to Niagara. Benn averaged 1.9 points and 9.3 minutes in 28 games this past season.

I presume this is a playing time question, with big-time guards Corey Stokes and Corey Fisher coming to the Main Line next season. Niagara is coached by Philly guy Joe Mihailich, and went to the NCAA Tournament this past season where they won the play-in game. So for a Cardinal Dougherty grad, it makes sense as a destination.

Your thoughts?