The Albany Great Danes celebrate after their 2-1 win over the Terps in the quarterfinals of the NCAA Tournament at the fieldhockey complex on Nov. 16, 2014.
After Albany recorded its first goal Sunday, the Terrapins field hockey team’s sideline shouted words of encouragement. The Terps had more than 50 minutes in the NCAA quarterfinals to battle back from the 1-0 deficit and save their season.
But in doing so, the Terps would have to do something they hadn’t done all year: win a game in which they allowed the first goal. And in Sunday’s quarterfinal, they failed to buck the trend.
Instead, the No. 2-seeded Terps allowed the Great Danes to add an insurance goal early in the second half before starting to piece together the sequences that had powered the nation’s top offense. By that time, it was too late, and the season came to a screeching halt in a 2-1 loss, leaving the Terps out of the sport’s final weekend for the first time since 2007.
“You can’t warm up to an underdog,” coach Missy Meharg said. “There is not time to warm up. You have to step on them. This is an area we have talked about a lot, and today was our storybook.”
For the second time in three games, the Terps offense sputtered out of the gate. And as a team that entered the contest 0-3 in games when they allowed the first goal, they could ill afford to struggle.
When the Great Danes scored midway through the first half, the Terps had taken just one shot. When the Terps lost to Northwestern in the Big Ten final the weekend before, their first shot didn’t come until there were less than 10 minutes remaining in the first half and the Wildcats already had a 1-0 lead.
“You look at the games where we have come out not winning and all of them, we have struggled taking shots in the first half,” Meharg said.
The Terps managed four shots after Albany’s goal, which still left them well below their average of more than 10 shots per half. Getting off to a hot start was a focal point after the loss to Northwestern, and the Terps succeeded in doing so in Saturday’s first-round matchup with Princeton.
But they couldn’t replicate that early energy against the Great Danes.
“We’ve, at different times of the season, let what would be, by definition, the underdog kind of rule our world in the first half,” Meharg said. “Unfortunately, our leadership group let that happen again.”
In both of their losses to Northwestern this season, the Terps managed to tie the game before ultimately falling to the Wildcats. The Terps never took the lead in any of the matchups in which they surrendered the first goal, though.
And Sunday, the Terps allowed a second goal before finally getting one back. It left them with 6:45 to tie the game.
“[The final minutes] were awful,” Albany goalkeeper Maxi Primus said. “I trusted in the team, but I knew that Maryland [would] try everything to score.”
For the Terps, however, it was a feat that had eluded them all season. And that didn’t change during the waning minutes of their season.
As was the case in the previous three comeback attempts, the second-half push came too late.
“If we could’ve played like that the whole game, then who knows what the score could’ve been,” forward Alyssa Parker said.
