These two were probably destined to play for the title. PSU ended the season as the #1 ranked team. But Stanford got the #1 seed in the tournament. PSU has now won 25 straight matches with their last loss coming September 15th against, you guessed it, Stanford. Stanford and Penn State are also the only two teams in the country who have made every NCAA tournament.
Stanford needed five games to win their semifinal match against USC, fighting off a match point in the fifth game to do it. Penn State, on the other hand, swept Cal in three, continuing the roll that they have been on since the start of the NCAAs. PSU got stronger in every game winning 30-28, 30-25, 30-16. Cal was actually the first team in the entire tournament to score 20 points on PSU – they have been that dominant.
The finals will be on ESPN2 Saturday night at 9PM EST. Unfortunately, that the same time that I’m having my fifth annual State College Santa Crawl (poor planning on my part). The good news is that I can maneuver the crawl so that we’ll just move from one bar to another between games so we should be able to catch most of the action anyway (weather permitting, that is, the forecast isn’t too good right now).
On a related side note, I was down at the Tavern last Saturday after watching PSU beat BYU for the regional crown when one of PSU’s players, Kate Price (Kate’s the one who went into the stands for that spectacular save that I mentioned last week), came in with some former players. I’ve known Kate for about three years now (her older teammates corrupted her and used to sneak her into some of the local taverns as a minor).
Kate begged me to show the others one of my tricks that I rarely do. It involves someone freely picking a card out of a deck, signing it, returning it to the deck, then shuffling the deck. After giving the deck back to me, I toss the deck into the air and the signed card winds up sticking to the ceiling. I don’t do the trick very often because it ruins the deck. In addition to the one card on the ceiling, the other fall to the floor and just scatter everywhere. Even if you bother picking the cards up off of the floor, they’re usually too messed up to use anymore. But it was near the end of the night, the deck I had was kind of messed up anyway, and Kate had just won a big match, so I relented.
One of the secrets of doing the trick is to make sure that you put it on a ceiling that’s high enough that someone can’t just pull the card down. The Tavern ceiling is about ten feet high so I figured I was safe. Wrong. I overlooked the fact that while Kate is a girl, she’s also 6’4″ tall and a top caliber NCAA athlete. The card stuck cleanly to the ceiling but as her girlfriends stood there staring at the card, Kate just took a running jump and cleanly picked it off of the ceiling. I was caught red-handed with wax stuck to the back of the card. Of course, they still couldn’t figure out how I found the card and got the wax on it, but a little bit of the awe and amazement was gone. Next time I need to remember not to underestimate my audience.