The weather this Homecoming Saturday was unseasonably warm and, at 10 to 15 degrees hotter on the turf at Bello Field, made for sticky playing conditions in the weekend's field hockey matchup.
But the real heat was playing out on top of the turf, where unranked Tufts was locked in a battle with the No. 1 team in the country. The Jumbos gave undefeated Bowdoin its biggest scare of the season, becoming the first team this season to score against the Polar Bears, winners of eight straight shutouts.
The Jumbos played from behind all game and eventually fell 2-1, a victim more of a slight dip in their own level of play than of an unstoppable Bowdoin team.
"It wasn't our best game, but it wasn't a fluke game - we played the No. 1 team in the country down to the very end," senior co-captain Ileana Casellas-Katz said. "We didn't just happen to score, and they didn't just happen to just win by a goal. I thought the score accurately reflected how we played, and I thought we played pretty well."
The final score was the same as last year's game in Brunswick, Maine, in which the Jumbos stumbled to a 2-1 finish on a late goal. But the rest of the numbers from Saturday's game filled in a clearer picture.
Coming into the matchup, Bowdoin had outshot its opponents 190-36 and held a 95-25 advantage in penalty corners. Not only had no team scored on the Polar Bears, but most hadn't even come close; only 12 of those 36 shots made it to the pads of junior goalie Emileigh Mercer.
"Bowdoin is a very strong defensive team, but we worked on getting in behind them," coach Tina McDavitt said. "We were going around them instead of through them and changing the point of entry, and I thought we did that well."
A strong Bowdoin core pushed the Jumbos to the wings, where they found success transferring the ball in the backfield and utilizing the sidelines. While the high positioning of a Bowdoin forward made the backfield transfer a little dicey, the Jumbos effectively used junior defender Marlee Kutcher and sophomore midfielder Margi Scholtes as hubs and swung the ball out to the wings.
One of those wings was sophomore Michelle Kelly, who had a career-high seven shots and the Jumbos' lone goal of the day. Less than two minutes into the second half, Kelly snuck in behind Mercer and sent home a tip from Casellas-Katz to even the score at one apiece. It was Kelly's third of the year, and Casellas-Katz's assist, the senior's 16th point of the season, puts her just five points out of Tufts' all time top-five in career points.
"Tina had told us that Bowdoin really packs it in on one side when they're blocking up, so we worked on swinging it around in the back and getting it up quickly on the opposite side," Kelly said. "We did a pretty good job with it, looking either to the wing, in my case, or if they figured that out, sending it to Ileana in the middle."
The Jumbos nearly doubled Mercer's save total on Saturday. They forced eight saves and held a 16-15 advantage in shots, becoming the first team to outshoot the Polar Bears this season. Seven corner opportunities were the second-most any team this season has secured against the Polar Bear defense.
Yet some sloppy fundamentals torpedoed the Jumbos' chances in the circle and let the Polar Bears slip away with the win, their fourth straight one-goal decision.
"We played well and we did a lot of good things, but we just made more mistakes than they did," coach Tina McDavitt said. "[The ball] hit our feet too many times in the circle and we were hitting free hits up in the air. In games like this, you have to get touches in the circle and you have to keep the ball on the ground. It's frustrating because I think we beat ourselves."
The No. 1 Polar Bears played their part, too. Junior Lindsay McNamara, Bowdoin's leading scorer and tied for second in the league with 20 points, assisted her team's first goal and scored the eventual game-winner, a rebound shot with 8:10 remaining. Mercer finished with eight saves in her toughest test of the season.
The game had an undeniable mental aspect for the Jumbos, past the implications of a possible upset win over the nation's top team. A victory would have completed the trifecta of wins over the top three teams in the league - Bowdoin, Middlebury and Williams - over the past two seasons. The three programs have dominated since the league's inception in 2000, beating up on each other but giving other teams few bites at the apple.
"We tried to look at it as Bowdoin's the team that has something to lose here," junior Marlee Kutcher said. "We had a hard time with teams like Amherst and Wellesley this season when we knew we were the better team, but we can play with the top teams in the NESCAC and [the game] was a chance to show that."
"I think we came in with the right attitude, and I don't think we were outplayed mentally," Casellas-Katz said. "We've been right up there for two or three years now. We knew we had nothing to lose, and the only thing we had to gain was respect."
Whether they gained that respect is unclear; Bowdoin is still undefeated, and Tufts picked up another loss as the season passed its halfway point. With Bowdoin at 6-0 and Colby at 0-6, several teams are hovering around .500 and still in the running for postseason berths.
The Jumbos will face one such team, 4-2 Trinity, on Saturday. But before they can get a crack at the opponent from their two tightest games last season - a pair of 2-1 decisions, with the regular-season game going to the Bantams and the more important NESCAC first-round game going to the Jumbos - they will have to get past UMass Dartmouth tomorrow afternoon on Bello Field.
