Senior year brings out all different forms of nostalgia. I realized, yesterday, during the second half of the women's soccer team's NESCAC quarterfinal game against arch-rival Williams College, that it was the 55th game I had seen the team play. I realized, about five seconds after the final horn sounded on the 1-0 Williams win, that it was also my last.

Originally, I had a longer column written for this issue, about how much the NESCAC tournaments suck, how unfair they are, how much they screw us over, but this is not the time for whining. It's the time for remembering.

I remember the first soccer game I ever saw. It was my freshman year, the home opener against Trinity, back when I was a lowly staff wri-well, I guess I still am. We won that game, 3-1, and we've won most of the games I've watched since I've been here.

I remember the NCAA tournament that year, the incredible 3-2 come-from-behind triple-overtime victory over William Patterson University in the Sweet Sixteen, the bitter 1-0 loss to Elizabethtown College one week later.

I remember sophomore year, when the team endured its bumps and bruises en route to a 9-3-2 regular season record, before the second-most thrilling scoreless game I've ever seen (comparable to the 1999 World Cup Final), the Jeffs' NCAA Regional Semifinal against Williams. The Ephs won on penalty kicks, and the taste in my mouth was just as bitter then as it was after the Elizabethtown game.

I remember junior year, when the offense went from prolific to nonexistent and back to prolific in less time than it takes to say "GOAL!" I missed exactly 46:18 of play during the 1999 season-the second half and overtime of the Jeffs' 2-1 season-ending loss to Middlebury College in the ECAC semifinals. I remember that, too. That bitter taste still hasn't gone away.

And, of course, now it's senior year, when the same players who were wild-eyed freshmen when I was no better-Co-captains Meg Riley and Alexa Faigen-have made me see just how old we all, at least supposedly, are.

Women's soccer has always stood out-with no offense to basketball, field hockey or lacrosse-because that team, more than any other, was the first team I ever really loved.

I was hyper after they won, I was down and depressed after they lost, I was completely unapproachable after the tough, end-of-season defeats that every team-save one-must inevitably endure. Yesterday's heartbreaking loss to Williams, the same Williams team that had been on the losing side of the teams' other meeting of the season on Oct. 14, was just such a loss.

It was, however, a little different as well. I'm sure yesterday's loss will weigh heavily on the mind of the returning players when next season rolls around. I'm sure it will weigh heavily on the mind of the seniors, for whom, sadly enough, there is no next year.

But it would be wrong for me to say that it weighs heavily on my mind too. This time there isn't the same bitter taste in my mouth. Instead, there's the quiet satisfaction of more pleasant memories than I could ever fully bring out in a column, and the quiet sadness of knowing that there were three seniors, not two, who had their last women's soccer game yesterday.

Well after the final horn had sounded, I sat quietly on the bench, next to Coach Morgan, looking out at midfield. Meg and Alexa were just standing there, unwilling to accept that it was, in all of its finality, over. I certainly wasn't either, and many, many years from now, I'm sure I will remember that too.

Steve Vladeck '01 is a staff writer for The Amherst Student.