Eight in the Box

	Ashley Koester hugs goalie Ashley Gersuk after Northwestern defeated Dartmouth to advance to the title game. AP

1. Give it up for the Northwestern University women's lacrosse program, which punctuated a perfect (21-0) season with a 13-10 defeat of Virginia in the national championship match last Saturday in Annapolis, Md. The Wildcats' success story is remarkable on many fronts. To name a few:

• It marked the school's first national championship in any sport since 1941.
• It marked the first time in any NCAA division, men or women, that the national champion in lacrosse came from beyond the Eastern Time Zone.
• Northwestern's program was dropped in 1992 and not revived until four years ago. Here is the Wildcats' record under coach Kelly Amonte Hiller (a former two-time national player of the year at Maryland and the sister of Philadelphia Flyer wing Tony Amonte):

2002: 5-10
2003: 8-8
2004: 15-3
2005: 21-0

While women's college lacrosse may not be as advanced a distaff sport as, say, women's basketball, what the Wildcats have accomplished is incredible. Consider the tale of fifth-year senior defenders and identical twins Ashley and Courtney Koester. During the fall of their sophomore year in Evanston, Amonte Hiller drove by as the sisters were jogging and asked them to try out for a team that did not yet exist.

"We politely declined," said Ashley. "We said, 'We're from Indiana, we don't play lacrosse.'"

A couple of months later, the Koesters, who comprised a state quarterfinalist basketball backcourt as high schoolers in Richmond, Ind., were starting in their first lacrosse game -- the first lacrosse game they had ever seen. Since, they have participated in all 70 games Northwestern has played since the program was revived. Courtney is a first-team All-America and Ashley a regional second-team All-America. How suffocating is the twins' defense? Northwestern led the nation in fewest goals allowed this spring even though their goalie was not among the top-20 nationally in save percentage.

"Every day, (Ashley and Courtney) got better and better," Amonte Hiller said. "Now they are the two best defenders in the nation, probably the two best defenders I've ever seen. If I was ever going to draw up an ideal recruit, it would be the Koesters."

2. The funniest thing that I've read all month is Rob Sheffield's "Behind the Mask" (an as-told-to interview with Darth Vader) in the current issue of Rolling Stone. It actually reads a lot like the interviews with Burt Reynolds that you've seen lately (i.e., '70's megastar falls on hard times, then has his career resurrected in '05). An excerpt:

"Guess I did party too hard for a while. I'd always wake up with a hangover and a couple of Stormtroopers. Most of the times I didn't even get their names. Hell, do Stormtroopers even have names? They all look the same upside down. Anyway, it got out of hand, all the drinking, all the mask candy..."

3. My personal brush-with-Dark Lord of the Sith: In October, 2002, I covered the final Eco-Challenge, the Mark Burnett-created adventure race, in Fiji. One team was made up of Hayden Christensen, his sister Hejsa and brother Tove, and an experienced adventure racer (whose name escapes me). They dropped out on the third day. One of the cameramen filming them told me Anakin Skywalker's alter ego said, "This sucks. I quit."

I couldn't blame him. That course posed more hazards than Mustafar.

4. Listen: I Google, I Nexis/Lexis, I even drop in on sportsjournalists.com, and I have yet to read anything about the following:

• Roger Clemens frosting his tips blonde (or at least it looks that way from what's sticking out from behind his cap).
• Manu Ginobili's outrageous flop in the waning minutes of Game Three from the San Antonio-Seattle playoff series. Manu, pretending to be bumped by a Jerome James-pick (even though replays showed they never touched) went head-over-heels airborne. For the next minute or two he even held his jaw gingerly, feigning as if he was checking for loose teeth. Even Brent Musberger likened it to a "Diego Maradona" ploy.
• Tom Cruise, at 42, is 16 years older than Katie Holmes. To put that in Hollywood chronology, that's nearly 1 1/2 Dakota Fannings.

Why am I the only one who cares about these things?