F. Hockey falls 2-1 to Tigers

PRINCETON, N.J. -- The ball only caught a piece of Sue Quinn's foot. Not much really, just a nibble. Inches further to the right, it would have come to rest comfortably against her stick, and been lauded as the Penn field hockey save of the year. But the ball did strike Quinn's foot, and the referee's ensuing whistle blew away Penn's opportunity for an upset of No. 16 Princeton yesterday. With the scored tied at 1 late the second half, Quinn had been the only thing between Princeton midfielder Amy MacFarlane's shot and an open cage. Despite Quinn's effort to stop Macfarlane's shot dead -- a near impossible feat -- the ball glanced off her foot, and the host Tigers were awarded a penalty stroke. Princeton forward Lisa Rebane neatly dumped the free shot in the upper right corner of the cage to the give the Tigers the 2-1 victory. "It should have been a corner," Quinn said. "It wasn't intentional. I didn't mean to stop it with my foot. It just happened that way." Rebane's penalty shot was an anticlimactic end to a long-anticipated season finale -- the last game in the illustrious careers of the eight Penn seniors who had recorded two straight Ivy titles. Though Princeton (12-3, 6-0 Ivy League) had already clinched the Ivy title with a victory over Harvard last week, both teams understood Ancient Eight supremacy would only change hands if the Tigers were to beat the two-time defending Ivy champion Quakers on the field. The fact a Princeton victory would give it only the third undefeated season in Ivy history -- last year's Penn squad and the Tigers in 1982 were the other two -- only raised the ante. "It was a rough game," Quinn said. "Obviously, they were out to get revenge. They're a good team. We're a good team. They just beat us out there today." But not nearly as easily as a team that strolled through the Ivy League might have expected. Penn (9-5-1, 3-2-1) jumped out to an early lead on its first corner of the game when assistant coach Val Cloud abandoned the normal corner strategy of allowing Quinn and senior midfielder Amy Pine to fire away from the top the circle. The Quakers instead pushed a pass to junior forward Kara Philbin on the right side. Philbin juked a Tiger defender with a reverse pull, and slid a centering pass across the circle. Junior forward Amy Shapiro, streaking in from the left, took the feed and hammered home the game's first goal. Clinging to a one-goal advantage, Penn's defensive strategy was to keep Princeton's dangerous forwards pinned along the sidelines. But despite a solid effort by Quinn, and senior defenders Mandy Kauffman and Melissa Sage, Princeton midfielder Amory Rowe broke through the center of the Quaker defense late in the first half. Rowe, at point-blank range, fired a bullet past Penn goalkeeper Suzy Pures to even the score. "You have to keep the ball out of the middle against Princeton," Kauffman said. "That's where their best players are. The times they did penetrate and get the ball down, it was right down the middle. The few times we had breakdowns in transition, they came right down the middle and scored." The second half erupted into a war. In a physical game littered with whistles, both sides complained bitterly about the officiating, yet only raised their level of tenacity as each second ticked off the clock. The Tigers, who had been inept on corners all afternoon, finally broke the tension on a corner with eight minutes remaining. Sliding the ball across the top of the circle, Princeton was able to dump it in past the Quaker defenders to a lonely MacFarlane who set up the winning score. "We played tough, we played strong," Penn coach Anne Sage said. "We matched up well with Princeton. It was even on the stat sheet. The difference today was that they got the breaks."