Goal Oriented

The goal of every NCAA lacrosse team that played this past weekend was to be able to practice again this week. 

And so it will go until there are only a handful of teams who get to celebrate their national championships with dogpiles on the field. 

On the Division I level, there were 47 teams who were practicing at this time a week ago. Now there are 16. 

The inverse of that would be that 31 teams had to turn in their equipment Monday. That doesn't count men's and women's Division II and Division III.

Of those 16 teams who are still practicing, there's only one school where both the men and women are readying for this week's quarterfinal games. Want to guess which school that is? 

Here's a hint: Were it not Princeton, odds are good TigerBlog wouldn't have mentioned it. 

Between them, the Princeton men and women played three NCAA tournament games, winning all three. Princeton averaged 19.7 goals in those three wins, as the women took down UMass 19-9 and Johns Hopkins 18-12 and the men bounced Towson 22-12. 

That's 59 goals in three NCAA tournament games. In all, there were 18 Princeton players who scored at least once. 

Only one of those 18 managed to get into double figures. That would be McKenzie Blake, who had herself quite a weekend. 

She started out with five in the win over UMass, breaking the record for goals in a season at Princeton. Blake finished that game with 78 goals, three better than Olivia Hompe had in 2017.

Blake wasn't the only one who broke a record in that game. Haven Dora had three assists, giving her 101 for her career, giving her the all-time Princeton record. Before TB gets back to Blake, he'll point out that Dora had four more against Hopkins, pushing her total to 105. 

Keep in mind that Dora is only a junior. With another year to go, it's likely that you can come back 50 years from now and still see her with the career record. 

As for Blake, with the Princeton record on her resume, the only single-season mark left was the Ivy League, which has stood for 43 years. It belongs to Francesca DenHartog, who played at Harvard in the late ’70s and early ’80s, which made her a teammate of Princeton Hall of Fame coach Chris Sailer. 

It was in the 1981 season that DenHartog scored 83 times. Princeton went into its game Sunday on Hopkins' home field as a slight underdog against the No. 8 seed. This could have been it for Princeton had the Blue Jays won.

Instead, the Tigers exploded yet again. And Blake? She was the detonator. 

How many goals did she score? How about eight. Is that enough? 

By the way, there was a show in the 1970s called "Eight Is Enough," about a father and his eight children and their misadventures. The woman who played the mother in the first four episodes actually passed away in real life, and her role was eventually taken by Betty Buckley. 

TB remembers liking the show very much when it was on but then saw a few episodes recently and thought "eh." That makes you appreciate the shows that stand up over time.

The eight goals Blake scored against Hopkins bounced DenHartog from the top spot. Blake now has 86, to be exact.

Princeton will need another big-time outing from its offense when it heads to North Carolina for Thursday's quarterfinal against the top-seeded Tar Heels. 

In the meantime, they, and the men's team, are practicing, just like you want to be at this time of May. The men will be facing Syracuse Saturday at 2:30 at Hofstra in their quarterfinal game, renewing one of the best postseason rivalries the sport has known. 

And if you're wondering what the full list of Princeton goal scorers from this weekend was, here you go: 

McKenzie Blake 13, Meg Morrisroe 6, Nate Kabiri 5, Tucker Wade 5, Jami MacDonald 5, Colin Burns 4, Haven Dora 3, Sophie Whiteway 3, Sean Cameron 3, Maggie Molnar 2, Collette Quinn 2, Nina Montes 2, Lane Calkins 1, Andrew McMeekin 1, Coulter Mackesy 1, Cooper Mueller, Chad Palumbo 1, Peter Buonanno 1.

Mackesy added four assists. His one goal was a big one — it gave him 164 for his career and sole possession of the Princeton men's career record.