Breathing Easier

So TigerBlog was in the doctor's office yesterday, ostensibly to get his splints out of his nose. 

The first task was removing the one stitch that connected the two splints. Before he did this, the doctor said "this won't hurt at all."

That, as it turned out, was a bit untrue, but it wasn't too bad. Then he went for the splints — and said nothing.

This was TB's thought process in the next five seconds:

Hey doc. Where's the reassurance that this won't ... mother--------.

Ah, but after that rather unpleasant moment, all was good. TB could actually breathe through his nose, which is the whole point. In case you're wondering, the splints were about two inch long pieces of plastic, and the doctor said that it's an improvement over the 12 inches of gauze that used to be packed into your nose after the surgery.

The doctor, you may recall, is a Cornell alum, one who didn't quite like when TB pointed out the final score of the football game between the two teams a week earlier. He was also bummed that Cornell had lost to Quinnipiac Saturday in men's hockey, but on the plus side, it turns out he's a big fan of Cornell men's basketball coach Brian Earl. 

By the time TB reached the parking lot, he figured he had to be the doctor's favorite patient, right? How many times a day can you talk about all that nose stuff without wanting to get some Ivy League sports in when you can?

By the way, TB said the last thing he remembered was mentioning that Chad Levitt was the 1996 Bushnell Cup winner and then waking up in the recovery room. Fortunately, TB doesn't have a lot of experience with anesthesia, and the doctor explained that patients can sometimes have retrograde amnesia after getting a general anesthesia, meaning they can forget the five to 10 minutes before it was actually administered. That's freaky.

Anyway, as TB said, the whole point of doing this in the first place was to be able to breathe a little easier. You know, like the women's volleyball team, right? 

Princeton entered this past weekend a game back of Yale with two weekends to go. The Tigers were to play Brown Friday night and then Yale Saturday night. Yale had beaten Princeton 3-0 in New Haven earlier in the season, so a Bulldog win Saturday night would have been a big nail in the Tigers' Ivy League title hopes.

When TigerBlog saw the score from Friday, he saw that Princeton had beaten Brown but had to go five sets to do so. Would the Tigers be able to turn it around quickly against Yale? As it turned out, the Bulldogs also went five sets Friday, against Penn, before winning 3-2 as well.

The grueling Friday nights meant that Saturday would be a mental test as much as a physical one. For Princeton, the task was to stop Yale's 17-match winning streak, which was the second-longest in the country, to force a tie for the league lead.

And that's exactly what Princeton did, winning in four sets.

MATCH POINT!

Dillon erupts as the Tigers down Yale 25-23 in the fourth set, and 3-1 in the match!#NCAAWVB pic.twitter.com/1lKHLDhDll

— Princeton Women’s Volleyball (@PrincetonWVB) November 5, 2022

There aren't too many venues in the Ivy League that get louder than Dillon Gym does for volleyball. 

Will Princeton be back in Dillon this year? That depends. This is the first year of the four-team Ivy League women's volleyball tournament, which will determine the league's automatic NCAA tournament bid.  

The four teams are set, as it'll be Princeton, Yale, Brown and Dartmouth. The host will be the top seed. 

Princeton and Yale are the only two teams left in the running for the league championship, which goes as it does in other Ivy sports to the regular season winner. The Tigers are at Columbia and Cornell this weekend, while Yale is at home against Dartmouth and Harvard.

The obvious question is who hosts the Ivy tournament if both teams finish 13-1 with only a loss to each other. Turns out, the answer is Yale, who holds the first tiebreaker edge by virtue of having beaten Princeton 3-0, to the Tigers 3-1 win the other night. 

Princeton could still host, but it would require at least one Yale loss.

Either way, the Tigers had a huge weekend when it was most needed. As a result, they are still in the hunt for an Ivy League title, something that would have been most unlikely had they lost to Yale. 

In other words, they're breathing a little easier this week, even as the season reaches its crucial points.

Breathing easier. Great moments in segueing.