A collision course, at least, until the Jeffs became the latest victim of a shortage of at-large berths in Division III NCAA Tournaments. In women's lacrosse, there is precisely one and only one. What that meant was Amherst's three-way tie atop the NESCAC with third-ranked Middlebury and fourth-ranked Williams guaranteed that one of the nation's top four teams would be left out of the NCAA's 16-team field.
As it turned out, the Jeffs received the short end of the stick, and it would have been equally unjust to keep the Ephs or Panthers out of the tournament. The 2000 Final Four, which was held at TCNJ, featured the Lions, Middlebury and Williams, along with Salisbury State University, the seventh-ranked team in the final 2000 regular season poll.
TCNJ showed exactly how much Salisbury deserved to be in that quartet with a 19-4 semifinal win, an all-time record for margin in the Final Four, before Williams ousted Middlebury in the other semifinal. In the championship, TCNJ cruised past the Ephs by a 14-8 final, putting a cap on a perfect 17-0 season.
Perfect, except that they never had to play the second-best team in the country, the same team that was responsible for their last loss in 1999. It doesn't always work out that the top-ranked teams play for the national title-just ask the University of Tennessee women's basketball team-but the Lady Vols were knocked out of this year's NCAA hoops tournament; the Jeffs never were.
Instead, the game between the top two teams from 2000 had to wait until last Thursday, and it only happened then because of a risky scheduling move by Amherst Head Coach Chris Paradis. In the aftermath of last year's NCAA snub, the Jeffs went out and found the three best teams they could to add to their non-conference schedule, giving up their annual spring break trip to Florida to do it. Consequently, this year's schedule featured the likes of Mary Washington College, the number-six team in the pre-season poll, Salisbury, the number 10 team in the pre-season poll, and TCNJ, all during the season's first five days.
In hindsight, the move was brilliant, though it could certainly have backfired as well. Amherst, now the number-one team in the country for the first time in school history, knocked off all three teams, including the top-ranked Lions. The win over New Jersey, the 2000 NCAA champions, came on the same field that they won the national title on, and was their first regular-season loss since 1990 and their first defeat in Lions Stadium since 1991.
Ironically, that game took place exactly 10 months to the day of TCNJ's win over Williams in the 2000 NCAA title game, 10 months too late for the 2000 Jeffs, whose season officially ended with a phone call the night of the NCAA selection show. Unofficially, however, I think it's safe to say that the controversy finally ended last Thursday, and, this time around, it ended where it was supposed to all along: at Lions Stadium, not on a phone.