In rough season for Virginia, the winning is familiar

Familiar ground for the Virginia men's lacrosse team is playing deep into the NCAA Tournament, having its seniors forced to stage their own delayed graduation ceremonies (because they missed the real thing while aiming for another national title), moving on to the Final Four.

It all was happening again Sunday during a delightfully taut 10-9 quarterfinal win over Stony Brook, a lacrosse pipsqueak no longer. Though the game was unexpectedly good entertainment for the 10,024 spectators, the result was thoroughly old hat to Virginia - 33 times a participant in NCAA postseason play and four times a national champion.

Virginia's graduation ceremonies were held Sunday, but in what has become a tradition of sorts, the lacrosse seniors will formally receive their diplomas Monday. Then the team will play Duke in Baltimore next week, a bit more same-old, same-old.

Except that a bridge of natural order was washed away May 3 when Virginia senior midfielder George Huguely was charged with the murder of Yeardley Love, a senior member of the school's women's lacrosse team. The unavoidable shadow of that dreadful news remains, and the women's season ended Saturday with their NCAA quarterfinal loss to North Carolina.

"I was watching the [women's] game," said Virginia goalie Adam Ghitelman, a junior out of Cold Spring Harbor. "We really want to win for them now."

It was Virginia women's coach Julie Myers who said last week that the longer her team could keep playing, the better they would be able to deal with the tragedy together. That's true for the men, too, perhaps.

"It's been a matter for us," senior defenseman Ken Clausen said Sunday, "that we don't want this to end yet. We're playing for the girls and we're playing for Yeardley. It's been on our minds, and a motivation for us. We're happy to be staying together for another week."

Coach Dom Starsia thought his team could be emotionally drained, and a stretch of sloppy play could have been cited as evidence of that. After a crisp, speedy start that had Virginia ahead 5-1, the game turned, with Stony Brook the aggressor.

Starsia chose to attribute that to Stony Brook's unyielding play. "I don't think it was a result of us running dry," he said. "We've been unusually good in practice. It has been a concern for a few weeks that the emotional tank could become empty, but the heat sapped us, and Stony Brook just kept coming."

In making a handful of players available to reporters for the first time since Virginia's NCAA first-round victory last week, university officials made it clear that "in respect to the legal process," there could be no questions about Love's death. But a Twilight Zone sense remained inescapable: In the season statistics, Huguely's name appears after an "x" - noting that he is an "inactive player."

The situation is something the lacrosse community can't begin to identify with. "Obviously, we feel very sad for what happened; we feel bad for the women's team and bad for the men's team," Stony Brook coach Rick Sowell said. "They're playing with additional things on their mind, and I don't want to be disrespectful, but our focus was on playing and the task at hand." It's the only familiar ground now.