Easy Choices

While he was at the NCAA men's lacrosse Final Four, TigerBlog was asked how many league championships Princeton had won during this past academic year.

The answer, he said, was 16. Of course, he added, to find the time before that when Princeton won 16 league championships, you have to go back all the way to ... last year. 

If you're wondering, here are your 16 league championship teams from the 2022-23 academic year at Princeton: field hockey, men's cross country, men's water polo, women's volleyball, men's basketball, women's basketball, men's indoor track and field, women's fencing, women's swimming and diving, softball, women's open rowing, women's lightweight rowing, men's lightweight rowing, women's water polo, men's golf and women's tennis.

That list, by the way, does not include men's lacrosse, who came in second in the league during the regular season but then won the Ivy League tournament.

That's an extraordinary number of league champions. Given the fact that Ivy League schools compete for a championship in more sports than pretty any other league, it's hard to imagine too many times that anyone has won 16 league titles, let alone 16 in consecutive years.

At the end of pretty much any year, whether it's the academic year or calendar year, TigerBlog likes to look back on the previous 12 months and talk about what the best moments were. Even in years with amazing accomplishments, it's not always easy to pick out the single best one.

This year? 

Princeton had an NCAA pole vault champion and NCAA wrestling champion. It had national championships in men's lightweight and women's lightweight rowing. The women's water polo team reached the NCAA semifinals. The list goes on.

The biggest story? Of that, there can be no doubt.

It was the men's basketball team's run to the NCAA tournament's Sweet 16. 

In all of TigerBlog's time here, he can't remember when a Princeton team — and its head coach, about whom TB wrote his back in March: "From the time his team had finished off Missouri last Saturday to reach the NCAA Sweet 16 until tip-off Friday night in Louisville, Princeton head men's basketball coach Mitch Henderson gave a master class on how to represent an institution." – did more to drive school spirit than this year's men's basketball team. This team did more than that, since its impact extended well beyond the campus.

Even now, any time TigerBlog talks to someone new while he's wearing something that says "Princeton" on it (which is often), the first thing they want to talk about is the Sweet 16 run.

It was extraordinary just to beat Arizona in the first round, in a game that was nailbitingly tense throughout. To come back and polish off Missouri two nights later the way Princeton did, taking control from the start and never looking back, was even more amazing.

And just like that, Princeton was in the Sweet 16. It only takes two wins to get there, but those are two really, really difficult wins to get. 

TigerBlog would suggest that the honor of having the Princeton Athletics Play of the Year is a relatively easy choice this year as well. TB first thought of this back in October, when he saw Hannah Davey's 60-yard or so pass that set up Grace Schulze for the first goal in what became a 4-2 Ivy-winning victory over Harvard. As he watched it unfold, his first thought was "will that be the play of the year?"

As it turns out, it's way up there — but not in the top spot. 

That play also came during March Madness, only this time it was on the women's side. The Princeton women defeated North Carolina State 64-63 in the opening round of the tournament, giving the women an opening round win in two straight years.

The Tigers trailed in this one 63-55 with five to play. Along the way, the Tigers had a 1 for 24 shooting stretch (yes, that's not a typo) while NC State had a 17 for 22 stretch of its own. And yet Princeton was still in the game.

Princeton got a three from Grace Stone and another three from Kaitlin Chen to make it a one-point game with less than a minute to go. It was still that way when Princeton got the ball back on a steal by Stone with just 11 seconds left. 

Out of the timeout, Stone then drained a three from the corner. Ballgame. It was an extraordinary shot, one that was put up with complete confidence, and which splashed through while barely moving the net. 

That was the play of the year. It would have been so in pretty much any year, to be honest.