Instead of wheels up, it would now be nearly an hour of sitting on a remote part of the tarmac. For the group of 29 that made up the Princeton field hockey travel party, you would think such news would have been met with annoyance.
After all, the Tigers were headed home after a very, very long weekend, one that saw the team leave the Caldwell Field House parking lot at 7:45 am Friday morning. Now it was Monday evening, and what was to have been a late-night arrival back in Princeton had suddenly become an early-morning one.
This is the kind of situation that leads to annoyance and frustration.
Instead, an impromptu team party broke out, with laughing, storytelling and the kind of banter that comes from a close-knit team like this one. Two little girls ventured back to talk to the players. A man who had just run the Chicago Marathon and then found himself seated in the middle of all of this kept saying "you guys are great" over and over.
Annoyance? Hardly. Not with this group.
Besides, with the way this trip had gone, who actually wanted it to end?
Princeton field hockey had itself quite a four day weekend, didn't it. By the time the bus rolled back into Caldwell, the Tigers had been together through a long bus ride to New Hampshire (with a stop at Amherst College for a practice session), a hurried bus ride to Boston, the flight to Chicago, a homecoming party at the house of one of its players in Wilmette and then the long and delayed trip home.
There were meals, hotels, miles and miles on buses — pretty much all spent singing, laughing, teasing (the good kind) and mostly just enjoying the time together after midterm week.
There was also the matter of business. Princeton had two games to play, and both would turn out to be big wins, with 120 minutes of field hockey that saw the Tigers never trail at any point.
It started Saturday with a 4-0 win at Dartmouth in a game in which freshman Caitlin Thompson scored her first two career goals, including one 58 seconds into the game for the fastest goal by a Princeton player in 74 games.
It ended Monday in Evanston, when Princeton defeated top-ranked Northwestern 3-2, ending the Wildcats 15-game winning streak, a run that included last year's NCAA championship. What proved to be the game-winning goal came from Beth Yeager, making her the sixth Tiger ever to reach 50 goals, and goalie Olivia Caponiti made it stand up with big saves on three penalty corners in the final 30 seconds.
The wins were big. The greater experience is what they'll all remember.
You can draw a straight line from the on-field performance to the camaraderie and team-first mentality that comes from trips like the one this team just had. It's a stretch to say that it's the reason Princeton took down the No. 1 team in the country because of how much fun everyone had the night before at sophomore Izzy Morgan's house.
You need the kind of talent Princeton has as well, but you also need to be, literally and figuratively, all on the bus together. This can be challenging for a team that has nearly a 50-50 split between American players and international players (10 from England, one from Germany), and yet every conversation, every interaction, is a mix of the two accents.
There are no cliques. There's only one large group of Tigers.
TigerBlog had a front-row seat for the entire trip (or, in the case of the flight home, a 35th row seat, after his 37th row seat on the way to Chicago). The team culture is evident, starting with head coach Carla Tagliente and associate head coach Dina Rizzo, with assistant coaches Pat Harris and Pattie Gillern. They set high standards. They are competitive. They are driven to win.
And they also are driven to make the experience a fun one. They laugh along with their players when the time is right. They perfectly balance two hugely important dynamics: when to be serious and when to have fun.
If you can figure that out, you can have weekends like the one just passed.
When the plane finally got back to Newark, there was nobody with those red flashlights to guide the plane to the jetway. The wait for someone to show up? That was 50 minutes.
Again, nobody seemed to mind. TigerBlog was in Seat 35F, by the window. Sophomore Pru Lindsey, who is having a breakout season, sat next to him, in the middle. The two delays enabled her to watch the entirety of "Gladiator," a movie she'd never before seen.
The lesson? Enjoy the moments, without worrying about the other stuff.
If you can get enough people to buy into that kind of attitude, you can have weekends like the one Princeton field hockey just did.
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