No Judgement

You know what TigerBlog hates (besides winter)?

Sports that are judged. You're just begging for reputational biases or, even worse, outright cheating, all of which lends itself to questionable outcomes. 

Take the side-by-side bumpy-hill skiing, or whatever it's called. Two skiers race down a hill, stopping along the way to twirl and somersault and a bunch of other things that slow them down, eventually getting to the finish line — and then you wait for the judges to decide who won. 

When TB watched this event (he thinks it's called "dual moguls") the other day, he couldn't help but think of the words of one of the greatest American authors of all time: 

Then those things ran about with big bumps, jumps and kicks and with hops and big thumps and all kinds of bad tricks.  

Why not just make the tricks the same for all the skiers and then whoever gets to the bottom first after having done all of those tricks wins? Instead, the woman who won the gold medal finished well behind the silver medalist, but the judges awarded her first by one point. 

Bonus points, by the way, to those who correctly identified the quote, which TB will tell you at the end.  

You know what event TB was awed by? Skeleton. 

Basically, you're on a sled similar to the one that everyone had as a kid, only you're flying down an icy course at speeds that approach 80 miles per hour, with winding turns and 180 degree direction changes, not to mention your face a fraction of an inch from the track. TB wants to try it, and by that he means "no possible way would he ever do that." 

Janine Flock was the women's gold medalist and one of the feel-good stories of the Winter Olympics. The 36-year-old Austrian was in her fourth Olympics without ever having won a medal, finishing fourth in 2018. 

Lucky for her nobody came along after she crossed the finish line to tell her that someone who went slower won the gold because of subjective judging. 

Speaking of things that happened on ice this weekend, how about the end of the ECAC women's hockey regular season? That was as wild as almost anything the Olympics has had so far. 

Princeton went into the regular season assured of one thing — a first-round playoff bye and home ice for the quarterfinals (which, he supposes, is actually two things). How would it all play out? 

It started Friday night, when Princeton hosted Yale, where a win would have clinched the outright title. Instead, the Bulldogs won 2-0, vaulting them over Princeton and into first place with one game to go. 

Where did that leave the standings? Yale now had 45 points, followed by Princeton with 44 and Quinnipiac at 43. With three points for a regulation win, two for an overtime win, one for an overtime loss and zero for a regulation loss, the permutations were many. 

Saturday night saw Brown at Princeton and Yale at Quinnipiac. The Princeton-Brown game ended first, when Issy Wunder scored in overtime after the Bears had tied the game with 1:30 to play in regulation. This was all after Wunder had given Princeton a 2-1 lead with eight minutes to go.

The OT win left Princeton with 46 points, which meant Yale would win the outright championship with a regulation win, something that seemed inevitable with a 3-1 Bulldog lead with less than two minutes to go. 

And then? Shockingly, Quinnipiac scored two empty-net goals 38 seconds apart and then won it in overtime. Shocking indeed. 

When it all settled, Yale earned one point for its OT loss, making it a 46-46 tie for the championship, with Quinnipiac one point back at 45. For Princeton, its first ECAC regular season title came in the first year for head coach Courtney Kessel.

Yale earned the No. 1 seed over Princeton through the tiebreakers. Princeton will be the No. 2 seed, giving the Tigers this weekend off while its opponent is determined. The quarterfinals will be the following weekend, and the league's semifinals and final will be in Lake Placid March 6-7.

Oh, and extra credit goes to those who knew that quote was from "The Cat In The Hat."