All good things must come to an end, including the Blue and Gray’s stellar season.

Although the Hoyas played one of their best seasons in recent years, the 11-5-3 record wasn’t enough to take the team to the NCAA championship. The championship draw, televised last night, snubbed the team that came in third place in the Big East Blue Division and were quarterfinalists in the Big East tournament.

The Hoyas have not had an appearance in the national collegiate tournament since their stint in the 1997-98 season under ex-Head Coach Keith Tabatznik. Although the last decade has seen the team come tantalizingly close to making the tournament field, they have fallen short time and again by the slightest of margins.

This season was yet another heartbreaker for the Hoyas.

The start of the season was promising enough – after setting the NCAAs as a goal in the preseason, the team hit the pitch running in August, recording five straight shutouts. The five opening wins tied the best start for the Blue and Gray since 1998, and the five consecutive shutouts topped the previous record of four set in 1988. Sophomore goalkeeper Matt Brutto maintained a clean sheet of more than 700 consecutive minutes, and was ranked statistically as the nation’s best goalkeeper until conceding his first goal late in October.

“We have no regrets about the season at all,” Head Coach Brian Wiese said. He praised the team which had gone up from seventh place in the Big East in 2006, to fifth place last year and finally to third place this year.

The point that brought the Hoyas down despite a good season was the RPI – the NCAA’s Ratings Percentage Index, that calculates a team’s points based on the team’s win-loss ratio, and the win-loss ratios of their opponents and their opponents’ opponents. The RPI ranked the Hoyas at 57th place at the end of the season, making it a tough call to make it to the tournament of 48 teams.

“It ended up being a little bit more about math than anything else,” Wiese said. “What we did wasn’t the only thing that counted.” The interplay between the performance of opponents and the teams that the opponents played factored in more heavily than the Hoyas expected.

Wiese said that the Hoyas were unlucky to let some of their home games slip away, which could have boosted the Blue and Gray’s rankings. Victories against three big opponents, in his opinion, would have significantly swung the numbers in the Hoyas’ favor – losses to the University of South Florida, the University of Connecticut and the University of Notre Dame, all highly ranked teams, eventually sunk the Hoyas in the RPI.

USF defeated the Hoyas first in the regular season and a second time in the quarterfinals of the Big East tournament. UConn was responsible for an overtime tie at home, and Notre Dame emerged victorious with 2-1 at South Bend.

“We needed to win at least one of those games,” Wiese said. “That’s where we fell short.”

The end of the NCAA spells the end of the careers of six seniors, who combined for 12 goals, four assists and 73 shots this season. Although they were unable to reach the national tournament themselves, they will leave behind the determination and effort that brought them to the brink of fulfilling a feat that had eluded them for more than a decade.

“Next year, we will get back and redouble our efforts,” Wiese said. “We’re going to try to make it happen.”

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