Tigers Claw Radcliffe Dreams

It was a classic heartbreaker, the kind of defeat that sticks with players and fans alike long after the rest of a season has been forgotten. It was more than a simple loss--those are as common as victories. A lot of ingredients go into a real heartbreaker.

The first thing you need is an undefeated, untied team, a group of players in the habit of winning. Take for instance the 6-0 Radcliffe field hockey team that traveled down to Princeton last weekend.

It helps to add a mixture of complete domination and clutch performances. Take for example Radcliffe's one-sided routs over Tufts (4-0), Cornell (3-0) and Wheaton (3-0), and the cliff-hangers over powerful squads from Bates (2-1), Dartmouth (3-2), and Northeastern (2-1), contests in which the Crimson stick women demonstrated an amazing knack for doing what had to be done when a game was on the line.

Just for spice, throw in some colorful players, like the four freshmen who won starting jobs on the 'Cliffe squad, led by Sarah Mleczko, who scored more than half the team's goals in the first six games. Stir in something for body and character, like seniors Karen Linsley and captain Ann Dupuis, responding to the opportunity of the first winning season of their careers by playing like maniacs.

So, you've taken care of all the ingredients. All you've got to worry about now is the game itself. Above all else, the score has got to be close. The losing team must have had chances to win right up to the heart-rending conclusion, which could work out something like Mleczko dashing down the field with the ball and feeding it to Linda Cabot for a last-second shot knocked away by the Princeton goalie.

If things come out perfectly, the score will be 1-0--there will be a single goal towering over the whole season--and the clincher will come on a strange play, the kind nightmares are made of. For example, we could imagine a superb defensive player like Dupuis accidently deflecting a Princeton shot into her own net.

That's the formula for a real heartbreaker, and that's exactly what the Radcliffe field hockey team got on Saturday, a 1-0 loss on a freak goal that might well hold up as the only blot on an otherwise marvelous season.

For most of the players on the team, the loss is a matter of living to fight another day. Except for Linsley, Dupuis, and junior Lucy Wood, every player on the team is a freshman or a sophomore and will have at least two more shots at the Tigers.

Dupuis and Linsley looked at the Princeton match up as the biggest game of this, their last campaign. They remembered the string of one-sided losses, and Dupuis has actually played against, and lost to, many of the Princeton players since their high school days in Philadelphia. "We really wanted to beat them badly," she said yesterday.

The seniors went into the game feeling the way the other players will surely feel next year when they seek revenge for this year. "I think that we communicated that feeling to the freshmen," Dupuis said yesterday, but perhaps they hadn't. An uncharacteristic lack of fire was the reason Dupuis cited as the root of Saturday's defeat.

Until Saturday, the stickwomen had spent the season surprising people, going into games as the underdog only to psych themselves to a sky-high level and pull off the upset.

But on Saturday, Radcliffe was the power. The Crimson stickwomen were on the top of the mountain, and it was once-beaten Princeton that was trying to knock them off. "For the first time this year, we were nervous instead of psyched," Dupuis said.

Two hours later, the result was the end of the seniors' dream of that perfect final season. It was a classic heartbreaker.