Our season came to an abrupt end the other day in overtime as Adam Hyde scored the game winner with 39 seconds remaining in the extra period.  While I still haven't brought myself to watch the game yet, hopefully I can still give you a few highlights.

As a team that emphasized from day one that we wanted to push every unsettled situation, contest every ground ball, and ride every time the ball went down on our offensive half of the field, it was an absolute blast to play a team who wanted to play the same way and who wasn't going to back down from us. Overall both teams were pretty evenly matched athletically with some mismatches sprinkled in here and there. 

Early on in the game it became apparent that we were going to be able to get excellent looks at the goal.  It's a credit to the other NESCAC teams that we felt we could run by Cortland's short stick defenders as well as their long stick middie much easier than in the last few weeks of the regular season.  As the first half drew to a close Cortland started to change things around and began to shut off Stone and Cabrera a bit as well as putting two poles up in the midfield which was a nice adjustment on their part.

Jim Cabrera finished his career with a 3 goal, 2 assist day where he did an excellent job of shooting the ball on the run and was a big presence out on the field.  Senior Frank Granara who was an absolute stud in the middle of the field and on defense this year also had a goal in transition for us and ended his career with a well played game.  Beyond that we had some solid efforts out of the rest of our offense including a big time shot by Mike Stone to tie things up towards the end of the 4th qtr but besides that it wasn't his best game of the year.  I'm sure it will serve as some good motivation for him looking toward next season.

Defensively we did some good things and Pete Britt and another huge day in the cage for us.  He's the most underated goalie in the country as far as I'm concerned, we're lucky to have him coming back for another year.  The other defensive performance worth noting was that of James Guay.  James held Ryan Heath, Cortland's 2x first team all american attackman, 2x player of the year in his conference who was 50, 44 coming into our game to just a single goal on the day and it came when James left him to help on someone else's man.  James' play was summed up at the end of the first half when Heath decided to take James to the hoop and James stripped him and knocked him over.

The story of the game was how Cortland rode us and how we turned the ball over in the middle of the field.  Clearing has been a strength of our team all year and their scheme/execution caused our guys to tighten up a bit and we didn't handle the pressure as well as we should have.  Their ride was the difference in a 3-0 run by them in the 4th quarter to take them from being down 9-7 to going up 10-9. 

After calling our "Panther" defense which is when our goalie leaves the net and we send a defenseman to double behind the cage with about 1:30 left on the clock we were able to put the ball on the ground.  From there we hit Mike Stone coming out of the box and he knew what to do with it.  We then had a chance to win the game in regulation as well as overtime before turning the ball over outside the box. 

As I said to the team yesterday in our last team meeting, I was proud of the determination and heart they played with in the Cortland game and that any Middlebury Lacrosse alum would have been proud to be a Panther after watching them play that day.

Also decided in the last team meeting were our annual team awards.  Lou Monroe MVP - Mike Stone, Ric Rosbeck MIP - Charlie Schopp, Baggattaway "spirit and leadership" - Frank Granara.

Our captains for the 2009 season will be Dave Campbell, Mike Stone, James Guay, and Pete Britt. With 12 seniors on the team next year along with 11 experienced juniors, we should have some strong veteran leadership.  We'll miss this senior class of Mickey Gilchrist, Jim Cabrera, Frank Granara, Rory Sanborn, Yanik Bababekov, Eric Olmsted, John Bambrick, and Glenn Bickley but the future looks bright for Middlebury Lacrosse.

Thanks as always for all of your support and I look forward to seeing many of you this summer out in Colorado!