Sunday, March 2, 2008

CSU 9 – MINNESOTA DULUTH 7

I GUESS WE TOOK MINNESOTA BY STORM

We completed a three-game, three-day sweep in Minneapolis with a 9-7 victory over the UMD Bulldogs today.  Nothing was easy here, and that would include our easy sounding 12-3 win last night.  Not many years ago I would have expected us to come up to an event like this and, excuse me, trounce Boston College, Minnesota, and UMD as just bumps in the road.  I no longer could possibly have those kind of estimated projections.  I and we respect the quality of these teams we played this weekend, and truthfully I had plenty of doubts about the possibility of winning these three.  I was prepared to take home plenty of good stuff from this trip without having to win all three games.  I never doubted that we COULD be good enough to beat all three.  My doubts were about whether we were ready enough yet to be able to do it now.  Well, they (team) in some ways emphatically answered many of my questions.  Not only that, but for us there was also wisdom to be found in those twelve quarters of lacrosse. There were many tests and sub-plots sprinkled into the drama.

OPEN MIKE NIGHT AT THE HECKLEDOME

For the record I felt okay going into today’s game.  We had gone far in my opinion in our two days and 2 games.  We had won both, and I felt good about that, but I knew today would be the stiffest test for many reasons. 

When we were there at the one dome last night, and then once we started warming up in the other dome today, there were many vociferous Duluth supporters nearby providing us with pointed details on how the Bulldog hammer was going to come down on our poor little Ram asses and why didn’t we just go on home to Colorado anyway?  God, I love college sports.

SHUT UP AND TALK ABOUT THE GAME

I would describe today’s game as a high energy, almost thrilling sort of affair with high drama throughout.

In my humble opinion, and really not just because we won, I thought that today was a really fantastic lacrosse game played by well-matched, highly ranked in the division teams.  The pace of the game was frantic yet never helter skelter. What did ‘happen’ often happened real fast out there.   There were many exciting moments.  People made little plays and some big ones too.  Other times a great scoring chance was turned away by a defense unwilling to yield or a great save by a goalie.  Yes, it was fun to watch and to be a part of.  The game itself honored, well, in many ways the game itself. 

We scored first, which benefited us in the heckling department as much as anything.  I didn’t hear that much from the ‘far corner’ after that first goal and that was early.  Perhaps someone ran out of beer, who knows?  They tied, and on, etc. until we went up 4-2 sometime in the second quarter.  I felt good about what was happening because in my mind scoring on these people was not going to be easy for us, or for anybody in our division for that matter.  The Bulldogs have many good things going on defensively so I was very concerned about if we were good enough to generate any good offense early.  We did that alright, and I was encouraged, but then we went ahead later on and did that other thing we do far too often, and that is to get a flat tire for about a quarter’s length of time, usually stretching over parts of two periods.  Today it was again the second and third ones.  Maybe I need to rework the old halftime speech.

So, we languished mid-game and meanwhile the Bulldogs of course thrived and they chowed on our butts right up to taking a 7-4 lead with not that many minutes left in that pretty ugly (for us) third quarter.  But then it just stopped.  We shut off the floodgates and somehow turned on our team love light again.  We played pretty well down the stretch, too, and scored the final five goals of the game to win by the two-goal margin.  We stepped up at the end and pretty much put our CSU stamp on the game when all was said and done.  I was pleased that we did not wear down late in the game on this last day in Minneapolis, and in fact I thought we brought tremendous energy to the final moments of the game after we had taken the lead sometime midway in the fourth quarter.

HONESTLY, I NEVER LIKE TO HEAR THE WORDS, "KEEP IT IN". Well, at least until there are only two minutes left......

We never backed off the throttle to try and hold the lead once we got it.  For the most part that has never been part of what we do.  However we do prioritize, and this team has already learned the difference between when we really need goals and when we just need to own the ball, and that kind of understanding can be a good thing for us and our development in the weeks to come.

FAMILY

This was so a team victory where everyone who was there contributed to our success, and that would include our bench.  The guys that didn’t play wanted to win just as badly as the ones with sweat on their brows did, and we all find strength in that.

THE TRICKLE DOWN THEORY

I always preach certain philosophies as if they were actual realities and I suppose that doing that sort of thing sometimes might make it seem like I presume too much.  At any rate of presumption one of the things I still believe with pretty much the same verve as I have since the first time that the ‘epiphany’ appeared for me many, many years ago is that if you do things as a team in certain good and predictable ways, then the winning and losing part of a game will always take care of itself, and mostly in a good way. 

It is never truly as simple as all that because there are so many potential pitfalls and obstacles that must be hurdled inside of one game sometimes, and each game truly does have its own life, but what we had today was truly a team victory against a very excellent opponent, Minnesota Duluth, 9-7.

I think it is interesting and somewhat indicative that we beat UMD and BC by identical 9-7 scores, and they are hardly the same kind of teams.

BUYING TEAM GOALS

We started off the season horribly in Man Down situations.  The opponents were like 10 out of 13 in the first two games, or something ridiculous like that. We talked about fixing it and how to fix it.  We have gotten to work.  Our goal was and is to bring our scored on percentage for Man Down situations back to respectability, a lot or one percentage point at a time.  We began that last night.  We stopped the man-down-bleeding, and now, after today, we have (on paper) stopped 16 EMO's in a row.  I think they actually scored one today that didn't make the score sheet or the exact time slot to go on the sheet, but whatever, we are just not that team that played Colorado College only 8 days ago, and that is in many ways. I heard they (CC) beat Washington & Lee by like 5 this weekend. Good for them.

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