The men’s lacrosse team’s season came to an end on Saturday with an 11-9 loss to Bowdoin in the NESCAC tournament at Middlebury. The lower-seeded team won all six games in the men’s and women’s tournaments over the weekend (both at Middlebury), and the Cardinals were but one victim of the slew of upsets. The team finishes its season at 10-5—its sixth-straight 10-win season and ninth straight winning season overall—but missed the NCAA tournament for the first time since 2004.

The 15th-ranked Cardinals jumped on the board first, as quint-captain Chris Jasinski ’08 put Wesleyan up 1-0 just over five minutes into the game. However, Bowdoin scored five of the next six goals for a 5-2 halftime lead. The Polar Bears stayed hot in the second half, scoring all four goals in the third quarter for a 9-2 lead with 15 minutes remaining.

A large playoff deficit to Bowdoin was nothing new for Wesleyan, however. In the last semifinal meeting between the two teams, in 2006, the Cardinals trailed 9-3 with 5:45 left in the second quarter but stormed back for a 16-15 overtime win. Head Coach John Raba noted that this previous experience allowed Wesleyan to keep a level head and not panic when it faced a seven-goal fourth-quarter deficit.

“I think it was not necessarily a sense of panic, but more a sense of, ’Let’s come out in this fourth quarter and play much better lacrosse than we’ve shown in the last three quarters,’” Raba said. “We just started coming out and playing harder, and at that point we were also playing so aggressively [and] talking so many chances that…it led to a lot of opportunities for us.”

Helping the Cardinals’ cause was Bowdoin’s two-headed goalkeeper situation. In the teams’ regular-season meeting, Wesleyan scored 12 straight goals to turn a 4-1 first-half deficit into a 13-4 lead. In that game, Gordon Convery ’08 made eight saves and allowed four goals in the first half but gave way to Alex Gluck ’08 to start the second half. Gluck allowed nine goals and made just five saves in the loss. During Saturday’s game, Gluck again came on to start the second half for Bowdoin in relief of Convery.

“We felt like Convery had our number early in the game and we felt confident going into the third quarter that we were going to come out and play…better lacrosse,” Raba said.

Wesleyan scored seven goals in the fourth against Gluck—the last two coming within 11 seconds of each other—sandwiched around a Bowdoin tally to slice the deficit to 10-9 with 4:34 remaining in the game. (Gluck’s goals-against average against Wesleyan now stands at 16.00; it is 9.36 against all other teams.) The Cardinals won the ensuing faceoff but had one shot hit the post and another sail over the cage; Bowdoin later added another tally with 39 seconds left for the 11-9 final.

“The gas just ran out by the end of [the 7-0 run],” Raba said. “We were only down by one, but we were on empty at that point because of how hard we played to get [to] that point.”

The loss was just Wesleyan’s third in seven NESCAC semifinal games; two of the three losses have come against Bowdoin. Bowdoin went on to lose to Williams in the championship on Sunday; both Bowdoin and Middlebury received at-large (Pool C) bids to the NCAA tournament. However, with only four Pool C bids available for the entire country, Wesleyan was passed over after receiving an at-large bid the previous four seasons.

Regardless, this season will go down as another outstanding year for the Cardinals. Wesleyan is one of only two NESCAC teams to post a winning record each season since 2000 (Middlebury is the other), and the Cardinals earned at least a share of the Little Three title for the ninth straight year. In addition, quint-captain Grayson Connors ’08 scored four more goals to bring his season total up to 43, giving him 125 for his career, the fourth-highest total in Wesleyan history. Connors’s 157 career points (including 52 this season) place him sixth on the all-time list. However, the Cardinals’ next three leading scorers—Russ Follansbee ’09, Jason Ben-Eliyahu ’09, and Lonny Blumenthal ’10—all return next season, as does 2007 NESCAC Rookie of the Year Jon Killeen ’10, who missed three of the last four games because of a fractured hand (Killeen did play against Bowdoin but was held scoreless).

Thus, despite the bitter end to the season, Wesleyan will look to remain among the NESCAC’s elite in 2009.

As Dennis Robinson ’79, the NBA’s Senior Vice President for Business and League Operations, wrote in an e-mail to Raba, “The great thing about athletics is that every year, the following year, you have another chance to do it all over again.”