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That was the game we’ve been waiting for.
The NCAA Championship tournament is a celebration of the interscholastic game, not a tournament of champions where only the best programs participate. And that’s the way we want it. An eight-team field of the top ranked squads would rub us the wrong way. It’s kind of unfair, and worse, it’s boring. We want the drama of the five seed giving a scare to the fourth. Maybe that SCIAC team will catch the top seed napping. Never say never.
Well, not really. It so rarely happens. We all know it. The teams in the bottom bracket probably won’t win. Actually, they never win. They can’t. It’s simply a different game they play in Division III, in the small liberal arts colleges, in the Eastern climate with fewer practice hours and no Olympic gold medalists. Everyone knows it.
And so we gladly withstand the first-round blowouts and the dodgy quality. Because it’s the right thing do to for our sport, for college athletics in general. Give the broadest reasonable set of participants a decent chance of winning their conferences. Let them earn the right to compete against the very best. Give their schools and classmates something to cheer for. Stoke some rivalries while you’re at it. Let the athletes and coaches participate in the ever-memorable experience of an NCAA Championship tournament. It’s a pageant. It makes all that hard work worth it.
And sometimes, even, it ascends to something sublime. Like Sunday’s match.
It was nearly preordained that USC and Stanford would meet in the final. The squads flip-flopped between the top two rankings all season. No other team was reasonably considered in their league. Each boasted obscene concentrations of international talent culled from Olympic rosters. And so the inevitable showdown finally arrived Sunday afternoon.
After two days of routine, sometimes desultory preliminary matches (27 unanswered goals in a match?), the final day of competition finally produced some drama. Eighth seed Pomona-Pitzer stormed back to beat Iona in the final seconds and secure the seventh spot. Princeton did the same to UC San Diego, in overtime even, in the fifth-place game while featuring a dazzling, daring, very raw young talent from Florida in the goal. Lovely appetizers for a stunning main course, it turns out.
It was all different once the final match started. Stanford looked good, much better than in their preliminary matches: supremely confident, organized precisely on defense, their prodigious talents playing at a higher level. They stomped out to a 3-0 lead with an almost arrogant dismissal of the Trojans’ acclaimed defense. That was exciting, a not terribly expected start. But USC wasn’t rolling over, that was clear. And more than that, everything was just so good: the tempo, shooting with pace and daring, inside water play, stifling but clean defense, precise driving, purposeful and exact ball movement.
And the individuals, the stars, Olympians and otherwise, played up to their talents. But perhaps more than at any time this season they cohered. These were teams in the pool, not mere collections of superstars with their egos and needs. It was beautiful to watch.
So when Hannah Buckling scored to finally bring the Trojans even at six goals each with only two minutes remaning in regulation it was clear that victory for either team would be difficult. Overtime began with a 7-7 tie. The first extra period ended at eight goals a piece. A nine-goal tie took them in to sudden death. An impossible flurry of saves and near misses in the second sudden death period. And finally, an awkward, banking eight-meter heave from Catalan import Anni Espar snuck past Stanford keeper Kate Baldoni with a minute left in the ninth period and ended the longest-ever championship match. Two hours after the start, USC had clawed back from a three goal deficit to win the match and the title. A scintillating end, and a euphoric relief, to an epic matchup.
Collegiate water polo will remain a competition between elite teams and “have nots” for the foreseeable future. The debate over the health of a sport in which only one of four schools (really) can win the national championship will rightly continue. Proposals, some whispered, will float among coaches and administration figures about how to more fairly distribute talent among programs, or even how to limit the number of players the best schools can admit. All of that will, and should, happen for the sake of growing our sport. But on rare occasions like Sunday we can all, sheepishly perhaps, appreciate the excellence Stanford and USC created in the past few years.
Because on Sunday that excellence, unfair or not, produced the best women’s college water polo match ever.
