M. Lax loses to Cornell on L.I.

The Quakers led 5-4 at the half, but the Big Red dominated thereafter. The Penn men's lacrosse team played two games against Cornell on Saturday in Hempstead, N.Y. The Quakers won the first one, 5-4, but were thumped in the second one, 12-2. Unfortunately, each game was only 30 minutes long, and together, they added up to one ugly Quakers loss. "It was really a tale of two cities, sort of," Penn coach Marc Van Arsdale said. "We had probably our best half of the year in the first half, and our worst half of the year in the second. I may not have thought it going in, but I think Cornell's the best team we've seen to date." The best team they've met this year ran all over the Quakers in the third and fourth quarters on Saturday. From the 10:46 mark in the third quarter until 39 seconds remained in the game, the Big Red scored 11 unanswered goals. Though Penn's performance amounted to the same result as their other two Ivy League games -- a loss -- the Red and Blue went about it a little differently on Saturday. The Quakers this season have usually started their games slowly, and then played as well as anyone in the country in furious comeback attempts. On Saturday, the Quakers began the game with intensity, and then, apparently, ran out of steam. "The lapse came in about a 15-minute segment from the middle of the third to the middle of the fourth in this one," Van Arsdale said. "Give a lot of credit where it's due, to [Cornell, but] that still doesn't excuse giving them the [11] goal run, that they got on us. "[Cornell] played awfully hard and fought their way back in when they were down a little bit, and we didn't do the same. We didn't stand up to the challenge when we got down." The Quakers fell behind the Big Red with 6:20 remaining in the third when Big Red attackman Andrew Schardt fired the ball past Quakers goalie John Carroll to give Cornell a 7-6 lead. Cornell never looked back -- they would score nine more goals before Quakers senior attackman Pete Janney finally found the back of the net with under a minute left in the game. "For some reason, we always manage to get things going in the right direction, and the other team starts to make a run and we kind of fall apart a little bit," Janney said. "We'd just like to figure out how to fix that." The Quakers need to fix it quickly -- they play perennial Ancient Eight champion and current league leader Princeton tomorrow night at Old Nassau. The Quakers will try to end the Tigers' 26-game Ivy winning streak by salvaging the positives that came out of the mess on Long Island. "The challenge for us is to build on the good stuff from yesterday, because it certainly wasn't all bad," Van Arsdale said. "We need to just find a way to maintain that for the 60 [minutes]." Not surprisingly, all of the "good stuff" came in the first half. "The good stuff early for us was that we were able to maintain a fair amount of possessions offensively," Van Arsdale said. "We had good long possessions, and people were sharing the ball. At the other end, we were playing good team defense for most of the first two quarters. I thought the facing off part of the game was a real plus for us in the first half. [Senior midfielder] Billy Reidy did a great job." In one of the few battles the Quakers ended up winning on the day, Reidy beat the Big Red in faceoffs, 14-12. But again, most of that success came in the first half. "It was just a reverse of what we had done very well early," Van Arsdale said. "The ball started to stagnate in some sticks offensively, we had some turnovers that weren't really forced turnovers. We just threw the ball away." The most frustrating aspect of the game is that the Quakers outplayed the 10th-ranked team in the nation for a full 30 minutes before the Big Red ran away with it. Penn obviously has the talent, but the Quakers can't seem to find the corresponding wins. "If we could keep playing the way we're capable of playing, we'd be a very, very good lacrosse team," Janney said. "The season's not a total loss. We still have just under half the season left, so we could definitely do good things. If we beat Princeton, that's huge."