46-10

The men's lacrosse game against Manhattan ended early, and TigerBlog wrote his story while sitting in his car in the parking lot on the top of 240th Street, above Gaelic Field. It was still light out, and there was a steady stream of Manhattan students who walked by, almost all of whom were either talking on their cell phones or texting from their phones or performing some electronically connected function.

TB, of course, was working from a laptop with a cellular internet connection, so he was wireless as well. Still, it wasn't long until he went from a world of infinite speed to one of, well, whatever the opposite of that is.

It took TigerBlog from the time he left the parking lot until he reached the first intersection with Broadway to get snarled in traffic.

That was just the start of it. TB needed about 10 minutes just to get through that mess and go one other block to the on-ramp for the Major Deegan Expressway. From there, the real fun was getting up the ramp to the Cross Bronx Expressway.

Okay, so it was rush hour. Still, if there are two lanes with one clearly going to the George Washington Bridge and the other clearly going towards the Bronx and Westchester, why did every single car in the right lane feel the need to cut back into our lane right at the end? Especially since there was no shoulder there. For awhile TigerBlog was pretty sure that someone was going to hit the three homeless men sitting on the ramp, holding signs that said "Homeless and Hungry." As an aside, TigerBlog gave a bagel to one of them.

TigerBlog is no stranger to New York City traffic. It started at a young age, when all of TB's relatives lived in Brooklyn or Queens or on Long Island. From that experience, he swore off the Belt Parkway, only to go back to it after getting stuck on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway one too many times. And don't get TB started about the Grand Central and the Long Island Expressway and the Northern State.

And the traffic reports on the radio are no help. They'll tell you about an accident on I-78 in Western New Jersey that had the right lane blocked but is now cleared, but they'll fail to mention that a million people or so are on the Cross Bronx. Perhaps they just assume everyone knows certain roads are always awful, so why bother.

How do these people deal with this every day? Around here, traffic consists of a mild backup on Route 1 or the light at Washington Road. In New York, everywhere in New York, the traffic is nightmarish all the time.

The other problem is that you don't know how long it's going to take to get anywhere. The men's lacrosse bus left at around 11:15 yesterday; TB left about 15 minutes later (and stopped at the bagel place to get lunch, which he would share later). Only there was no traffic going in at that time of day, not even at the George Washington Bridge, so everyone got the field early. The coaches had a brief discussion about possibly having left later, only to realize that they were just as likely to have run into miserable traffic that would have made them late for the 3 p.m. face-off.

Anyway, the traffic (which eased well on the Turnpike) kept TigerBlog from getting back to Jadwin Gym in time for the end of the women's basketball game, so he missed out on seeing the presentation of the Ivy League trophy and the cutting down of the nets.

The process of putting together a college athletic program in any sport is very, very complex. The recruiting process alone is so involved (and starting earlier all the time), and random factors like injuries, finances, grades, other schools, hidden gems and all of it go into deciding what athlete chooses what school and why.

Then, once the roster is assembled, there's the development of a team, the way each player meshes with the others and, of course, how they all mesh with the coaches and their system. And then once the season gets there, does anyone get hurt? Does everyone stay healthy? Did a flu bug wipe out a key weekend?

With everything involved, moments like last night's, when Princeton was cutting down the nets, are to be savored even more. Princeton's women's team is young, and arguably its two dominant players are a freshman (Niveen Rasheed) and a sophomore (Devonna Allgood). Does this guarantee that Princeton will win next year? Nope. As former Princeton men's coach Bill Carmody would have said, the woods are full of teams that everyone picked to win who didn't.

Going 14-0 in the league (and winning every one of the 14 games by double figures) is an extraordinary accomplishment, put together by this year's group with this year's team dynamic. Yes, the future does look bright, but that would have been little consolation had Princeton let it slip away at the end of this year.

There's another reason why this particular net-cutting was special. The Princeton women's basketball team has never before played in the NCAA tournament, but now the Tigers will do just that.

The men's basketball team made the first of its 23 NCAA tournament appearances in 1952. The men's lacrosse team made its first trip in 1990 and has been to 18 in all, a number one fewer than the women's team.

Women's soccer, men's soccer, field hockey, men's volleyball and men's water polo have played in the Final Four. In fact, every team at Princeton that competes in an Ivy League sanctioned sport that has an NCAA team tournament has reached that tournament - except women's basketball, which has now done so.

In extraordinary fashion, by the way.

It was a great night at Jadwin. Two senior nights honoring six seniors who helped turn the basketball fortunes at Princeton around. Two convincing wins over Penn.

The men's win gave Princeton 20 wins for the first time since 2004. The women's win gave Princeton a 26-2 record, building on its record for most wins ever by an Ivy women's basketball team.

The two wins left Princeton basketball at a combined 46-10; two years ago, in Sydney Johnson's and Courtney Banghart's first seasons as head coaches, Princeton was a combined 13-46.

Yes, it was a great night to be at Jadwin Gym. Even if the traffic out of the city was horrible.