An Early Spring Weekend

TigerBlog walked into the mailroom yesterday and saw a magazine in the Office of Athletic Communications mailbox.

It's rare these days that important information comes in the actual mail. Usually it's all electronic.

Back when TigerBlog was in college, there was a mailroom in each dorm, with rows and rows of mailboxes. Actually, the dorms at most colleges today must look the same, TB assumes.

Anyway, back then, it was always exciting to peer into the little box and see something staring back at you. Every now and then, it was an actual letter.

Perhaps you remember those? Back when people picked up paper and pen and wrote out actual longhand thoughts and ideas to stay in touch, as opposed to, oh, email, or a text or a 140-character tweet.

TigerBlog can't remember the last time he wrote someone a letter. It's been a long, long time. At least he still knows how to string words and sentences together in a longform and isn't solely reliant on abbreviated words and phrases and grammar and punctuation be damned.

Ah, but that's for another day.

Meanwhile, back at the OAC mailbox on the balcony, what TB saw, as he said, was a magazine. As he walked closer to it, he could see the wording on the side, in big bright bold white lettering, before he could see anything else.

And what did it say?

"Princeton Women Are Perfect."

 In the next split second he got the rest of it. There was Alex Wheatley, on a drive to the basket, on the cover of the Princeton Alumni Weekly. Obviously it was a recognition of the unbeaten regular season of the Princeton women's basketball team.

But the headline itself?

"Princeton Women Are Perfect." If you're a woman alum of Princeton, you have to be flattered by those words, no?

Anyway, that's what TB was struck by yesterday in the mailroom.

What he was struck by outside yesterday was how nice the weather was. Sunshine. Temps in the 60s. It was, dare he say, spring-ish?

It's the first weekend of April, after all. It's Good Friday today and Passover tonight and then Easter Sunday. The Masters is coming up, as is the first pitch of the Major League Baseball season.

It's spring, calendar-wise. And now, it would appear, weather-wise.

This is a huge spring weekend for Princeton Athletics. There are, from today through Sunday, 24 different events involving, if TB counted correctly, 14 Princeton teams - baseball, softball, men's tennis, women's tennis, men's lacrosse, women's lacrosse, men's track and field, women's track and field, men's golf, women's golf, men's volleyball, women's open rowing, men's heavyweight rowing  and men's lightweight rowing.

Almost all of it is on the road. The home events are the Sam Howell Invitational in track and field - named for the longtime Princeton Athletic administrator - women's tennis and the rowing.

TigerBlog will be on Long Island, where the men's lacrosse team plays Stony Brook. It's the first meeting between the teams since 1993 and third overall; TigerBlog was at the first meeting in the series, back in 1992.

This is a matchup of Top 20 teams who score a lot of goals. Between them, they're 14-4, and it figures to be a pretty entertaining game.

The women's lacrosse team is at Yale.

Princeton is one of three unbeatens in the Ivy League, along with Penn and Cornell. Yale is 1-2, a game back of 2-1 Harvard for fourth place, which is a big spot, given that the top four reach the Ivy League tournament.

Baseball and softball are on the road, at Harvard and Dartmouth. The men's tennis team is at Brown and Yale.

The women's tennis team is the defending Ivy champion. The Tigers went 7-0 in the league a year ago, making them the most recent Princeton team to fit the headline "Princeton Women Are Perfect" before the women's basketball team.

The Ivy championship defense opens this weekend at home, also against Brown and Yale. It's still not certain whether the matches will be outside at the Lenz Center or inside Jadwin Gym.

The mere fact that such a decision hasn't been made yet is a sign that the weather is getting better.

After all, two weeks ago? The outdoor courts were covered with snow.

Not anymore. Spring is here.

Let the huge weekend begin.