Pain Train Break

I figure, we're going to Yale in a few days, there is really no excuse for me to not have updated the blog by then. So now, starting at 2:51 AM, I'm going to knock out an entire week-and-a-half worth of ultimate business in the fastest time known to man. I'm part hummingbird when it comes to this blogging business.

Thursday we all drove down to the general Virginia area. One of the Sprinter vans picked Nasher, Slappers and I up outside of DC and then proceeded to rural Virginia to the Nate Raines estate. I'm not going to bore you with the details of how we eventually found it, but suffice it to say that that was the first time I've ever gotten lost by paying too careful attention to roadsigns. Nate's was awesome, even if we did only manage to find it by relying on a cop in a rest stop who knew, in Chuckie's words, "a friend of a friend" who lived near it.

Friday was a day of travel. Our van had a pretty solid iTrip with it, and no real adventurous souls like in the vans of yesteryear, so we stuck to our own music (mainly Tegan and Sara and emo-punk singalongs from Junior year of High school - the Starting Line, anyone?) instead of trolling the Southern talk stations. Blair would later criticize my music selection as too esoteric, and will later criticize me for using that word in a blog, but whatever, the new Shins album just had to be played all the way through, and I still contend that Wolf Parade and the Go! Team are also great Spring Break bands.)

Friday night we continued a team tradition of seeing a newly released movie based on a graphic novel (last year = V for Vendetta, this year = 300). For some reason we all sat in the first three rows, to be near each other I guess? My neck hurts.

Saturday we got our new uniforms. They look fly. Seriously. However, the darks were cut a bit, shall we say skimpily, giving players like GMail the vibe of a belly dancer. But between new warm ups, jerseys and shorts (about half of us got white shorts as an extra - so hot right now.) we looked like, you know, a sports team.

And then we played ultimate. It should tell you something depressing that I remember our playlists but not our games, but score reporter has us winning over College of Charleston 11 - 5, then over Yale 15 - 4, and neither of those teams really gave us a game. Then came Wake Forest, to take top billing in our pool, and we lost. Kind of had the game for a while, ended up having a streak of four breaks towards the end (against us, that is), playing without Yi, Rem and Nate... ah well. It was the next loss, to a team so not legit there's no record of us having played (basically a random assortment of players from schools in Florida, from what I could tell) that was the heartbreaker. I am physically sick thinking about it. God damn it.

Ok, so onto Sunday, out of the winner's bracket, and up against the host team, Georgia Southern. We rolled. Same rolling, although less so, against Virginia Tech. Then after lounging around for a while, we played Duke and beat them solidly in a game whose main value was in teaching us the stupid new pick rule. That is one over rated team, let me tell you. They lost in the PRE - quarters the next weekend after somehow getting into the power pool over us, denying us another shot at them, but I guess one solid win per season will have to hold us.

That was the semis of the Chumpionship, and we then proceeded onto the finals, but LSU had forfeited their semis matchup against Richmond, and our opponents used that freshness to their advantage. We could have won this game with a few breaks going our way, but we didn't, and we should be a strong enough, durable enough, gritty enough team to not need those breaks anyway. So we lost, and it was damn close, 10-12, but all in all we were pumped to be together and be heading further into spring break.

For the sake of my body, which has to run a track workout in 6 hours, I'll skip all of the non-ultimate stuff that happened over the next week. FO was a blast, if scarring for life. On the ultimate side, we had a practice, a scrimmage against Carleton GOP (we won, not as easily as we should have). Then a day of Yoga on the beach. Then scrimmages against Georgia Tech (rolled) and Cornell (rolled first half, traded second half). At some point in there we also eeked out a victory in a shortened game against College of Charleston, 7 - 5, despite being down two breaks early. Jeez.

Ok, then on to Ultimax. Booyah. We got dissed by being left out of the power pool, but it allowed us to finish with the best record at the tourney numerically speaking, so whatever. An easy win over Drexel, a slightly more challenging but never in doubt win over UPenn, and then a win over Northwestern totally based on our D line in the first half and our unreal O in the second half (not a single turn in the half - Ballin'). We only won that one by two, and then defeated Penn State pretty handily in the crossover game to claim the 6 seed heading into the next day.

After a delicious Golden Corral adventure (we need several in Hanover) we watched basketball in the hotel rooms and then headed back out for our last day of ultimate. Started out against William and Mary, we actually started off the game with two breaks against us (real smooth, Dartmouth) but gutted it out for a convincing 13 - 6 win - D line was nasty, starting in this round and going all day. Next came Northwestern again because Duke got rocked in prequarters, so we played NUT again, and this time won solidly, even though our O was not clicking as exceedingly well. (13 -7, if you care about scores, you unspirited blog reader). So that landed us in the Semis, up against Delaware. This was a great game, really solid O and gritty D that couldn't quite keep up from both teams, but they won it, 13 - 10. Considering that they won the Finals 13 - 7, that ain't bad (considering that they lost to both Harvard and Tufts in pool play, maybe it is. I'm just sayin.) So 3rd at Ultimax to start off our season? And we get back Rem, Tom Donahoe, Healthy Nate, Healthy Devlin and Dan Yi

Let's just say I'm excited for Yale Cup. Thanks for reading. That whole thing took exactly 31 minutes. I'd say the quality makes that totally unsurprising.