At the Eastern Championships last weekend in Princeton, NJ, the Harvard women's water polo team got a rude awakening.

The point of having an eight-team tournament divided into two pools of round-robin play is to make sure that one loss doesn't kill a team; that is, a squad can go 2-1 in its pool and still win the tournament.

But in its first game on Friday, a 7-4 loss to Bucknell ended all hopes that Harvard would have of finishing in the top three teams at Easterns and going to Nationals.

The reason was that Slippery Rock, the defending national champion and far and away the best team in the east, was also in Harvard's pool. So its loss to Bucknell meant that the Crimson could earn a 1-2 record at best, which means a one-way ticket to the losers' bracket.

And that's what happened. A 21-0 loss to Slippery Rock followed by a 19-9 win over Princeton ended the pool play for Harvard, and even though the Crimson went on to win the consolation and fifth place at Easterns, the team wanted more.

"I thought that Bucknell was a really good team," co-captain goal-tender Cheryl Frank said. "We didn't play as well as had played [earlier], but I felt that Bucknell was strong."

The Bisons stormed out to an early lead and held it through the first half, but a strong Crimson third period cut it to one goal at 5-4. Bucknell, however, scored two more to ice it.

Then came the Slippery Rock game, for which the score tells it all. There wasn't much doubt that Slippery Rock was going to win this one, and the defending national champion actually poured it on late, scoring many of its goals in the final period.

To finish the pool play, the Crimson took on the Tigers of Princeton, and defeated the host team pretty safely.

"Princeton played a really good [first] half," Harvard coach Maureen Travers said. "It wasn't as much a question if we were going to win or not, but [Princeton's] intensity was very high."

That put Harvard into the consolation bracket, and the first game was against Villanova, another team that showed good intensity. However, the Wildcats directed their energy towards violence, with one of their players getting ejected in the 11-3 loss to the Crimson.

The win against Villanova set up Harvard for a rematch with UMass, a Bucknell-like team that the Crimson matched up pretty evenly with. In the two squad's earlier meetings, both games went to overtime with Harvard winning one and UMass the other.

This time, the game was settled in regulation, as a goal by junior co-captain Missy Ford between the goal-tender's arms with less than two minutes left iced a 6-5 Harvard victory.

And with that win, the Crimson salvaged the Easterns.

"My only concern [after the Bucknell loss] was that they might fold," Travers said. "But they came right back. They were determined to show that our loss to Bucknell was not our true level of play."

It was also the last game for the team's seniors--Frank, Ana Dujmovic and Laura Lederer.