Playing In The Snow

TigerBlog's friend Todd said something the other day that seems to speak for pretty much everyone in the Princeton metropolitan area.

He said he's looking forward to seeing the grass on his lawn again some day.

It's certainly been awhile since that's been the case, what with the relentless snowfalls that have come one after the other the last few weeks. It actually reached nearly 50 degrees here Tuesday, and there may have been just the slightest hint of grass in some small patches of melting snow.

That was replaced yesterday, when the next storm passed through, leaving snow and a little ice on top. 

The plowers in TB's neighborhood decided to create a snow bank outside his house, and it's stacked up about eight to 10 feet or so at the end of his driveway.

It's going to be awhile before the grass is visible again. It's going to be a very long while until the last of the snow has completely melted. 

All of the snow reminded TigerBlog of one of his all-time favorite Princeton Athletics pictures:

The player in the photo is Sam Bonafede, who was the men's lacrosse face-off man and a freshman at the time the game was played. It was actually the second game of the 2015 season, a game played on Feb. 21, 2015, or six years ago Sunday.

Princeton won the game 14-12. TB's headline was this:

MacDonald, Currier Star As Princeton Skis?, Sleds?, Skates? Past Hofstra

Here was his first sentence in his story:
The only thing more beautiful than the peacefully falling snow on Sherrerd Field Saturday afternoon was the way the Princeton men's lacrosse team clicked on offense in the third quarter.

That's not bad, right?  

It was one of those days where nobody could really believe the game was going to be played and then once it was, it was awesome. TB is quite sure there isn't a player from the game who doesn't remember how much fun it was in retrospect.

He's not sure he can say the same thing about the very small number of fans who were in attendance:

 

Bonafede, by the way, is headed to huge things in his life. He's one of those people where that was clear from Day 1 when he arrived on campus.

In fact, he's in his final year of law school at the University of Chicago. He's already worked as a judicial intern for a U.S. Court of Appeals judge, and he's the editor of the University of Chicago Legal Forum.

TB once wrote this about Bonafede, during the team's 2016 trip to Portugal, after the team had spent some time at a local orphanage:
"Bono," as they call him, could be the perfect Princeton ambassador, always upbeat, always supportive. He's the kind of kid you look at and know that he's going to make a real difference in the decades to come.

Meanwhile, back in the snow, TB remembers a few other snowy Princeton events. There have been some football games. Some soccer. Somewhere buried on his computer TB has a great video of the women's soccer players at a practice/pickup game in a driving snowstorm.

There have been other lacrosse games, men's and women's, that have been played in snow, though not quite like the Hofstra game six years ago. The first Ivy League tournament championship game for men's lacrosse was played in snow in Ithaca - on Mothers' Day 2010.

TigerBlog's favorite Princeton Athletics snow pictures besides the one of Bonafede are the ones from Heps cross country in 2011, when a blizzard fell on the West Windsor course on Oct. 29. You can actually take your pick of any picture that was taken that day.

The other one is of David Patterson, the 1995 Bushnell Cup winner as the Ivy League Player of the Year as a linebacker on the outright Ivy League championship football team. Patterson is still Princeton's career leader in tackles, and he was an outright tackling machine, if a bit undersized by today's standards. 

Is he the best defensive player TB has seen at Princeton? He doesn't want to jump to any quick conclusions on that, so he'll get back to you next week with that.

Anyway, the 1993 game at Dartmouth, in addition to being a great on-field game and a great duel between the Big Green's Jay Fiedler and Princeton's Keith Elias, was one of the strangest weather games TB has ever seen (it also is, oddly enough, the last time he's seen Princeton play football at Dartmouth).

It was sunny to start the game. It snowed during the second quarter, to the point where the field was covered. By the end of the game it was sunny again, with no sign of snow.

In the second quarter, though, a picture of Patterson was taken that still all these years later looks tremendous. TB waited two years to use it on the cover of the media guide.

Here it is (thanks to TB's colleague Greg Paczkowski for going into TB's office and sending him the picture):

Now that's a great picture.