If Popeye had gone to yesterday's Harvard women's lacrosse game, the spinach-filled Sailorman would have surely said, "Blow me down!"

Amid the gale-force winds whipping over the Astroturf of Holy Cross, the Crimson (3-0 overall, 1-0 lvy) was able to stay on its feet and--no pun intended--blew out the Minutemen of UMass, 15-5.

"There were miserable conditions," co-captain Margot McAnaney said, who was out of the lineup with a broken ankle and stuck with the video camera duties. "It was very cold."

But bad weather has never bothered the Crimson, Especially when it is playing a team that has just restarted its lacrosse program, after a Title IX lawsuit forced UMass to do so.

"We knew coming into it that UMass wasn't a great team," senior Sara Downing said.

So the Minutemen, not wanting to get beat by 50 goals, decided that it would be best to stress the defense against the Crimson.

"They did pretty well defensively, but not too well offensively," junior Sarah Winters said. "They are a new program, but most of them are scholarship players. It's not like they have never played [lacrosse] before."

Still, they were no match for Harvard, whose frequent flyer miles for trips to the Final Four are beginning to add up, as junior Megan Colligan's output (4 goals) almost matched UMass's.

"We kept our passes short," MacAnaney said. "We were trying to work the kinks out of our set offense."

The Crimson defense, on the other hand, did not have any kinks to work out in the first place.

Even though McAnaney, an anchor of the defense, was out of action, freshman goaltender Kate Schutt and the other defenders effectively shut down the Minutemen offense.

"With Margot [McAnaney] out, the defense shifted well," Winters said. "And Kate [Schutt] has done particularly well."

"[Schutt's] doing really, really well," Downing said. "She's really aggressive coming out of the net after loose balls."

The Crimson will now have to bottle up some of that aggressiveness and save it for Saturday. For on that day Princeton comes to Harvard's Ohiri Field, for a game which will be the first big test of the season for both teams.

Last season the Tigers defeated the Crimson, 9-7, at Princeton. It was only Harvard's third loss of the season, out of 16 games.

And now that UMass has been dispatched of, the team is setting their sights on the showdown.

"We are gonna concentrate on [Princeton]," McAnaney said. "One of our assistants has been scouting them, so we'll start concentrating or the definitive reports."