Fear Factor

Caitlin took a seat in the far back of the bus with the rest of the seniors. Nervousness had awoken her more than 45 minutes before the sound of her alarm, and she hadn't bothered going back to bed. Alone in her room, Caitlin had slipped on headphones and played one of her favorite rap songs, "Clockwork," by Juelz Santana. No matter how loud she cranked the volume, she hadn't been able to drown out her anxiety.

Caitlin had joined her first lacrosse team in fourth grade, signing up for a recreational league at the urging of a cousin. When her dad, Pat O'Malley, picked Caitlin up from the season-opening practice, she climbed into the passenger seat and burst into tears. Every other girl on the team already had lacrosse skills built over several seasons, Caitlin told Pat. In comparison, she felt utterly hopeless.

In her senior season at Hebron, Caitlin sometimes struggled with similar unease; compared with her more experienced teammates, she still felt behind. Pat, who had coached his older son's baseball teams, sometimes tried to counsel Caitlin about playing under pressure.

"Forget about the score," he would tell Caitlin. "Just focus on the ball, and pretend it's practice."

"You never played lacrosse," Caitlin would retort. "What do you know?"

By Caitlin's senior season, Pat had learned to keep his distance. On game days, when Caitlin's nervousness dominated the house, Pat mowed the lawn or ran errands. Both Pat and Caitlin were nervous about today's game against St. Paul's, but they didn't talk about it.

Each season, Hebron scheduled a handful of games that coaches considered potential streak breakers, and today's match-up counted as one of those. St. Paul's plays in the Maryland Interscholastic Athletic Association, a Baltimore-based, private-school conference considered to have the best prep lacrosse in the country. St. Paul's had already lost five games so far this season, and the Crusaders looked forward to their contest against Hebron as a potential panacea: With one historic win, they could negate all prior struggles.

The match-up hardly presented such upside for Hebron. On Internet message boards, lacrosse players and fans had learned to predict Hebron's results not by wins or losses but by margins of victory. Earlier in the week, Caitlin had logged onto laxpower.com -- the sport's most popular chat forum -- during a lull in her economics class. She read posts suggesting Hebron would beat St. Paul's by at least five to eight goals. A close game would diminish the Hebron mystique, posters said. A loss would be unthinkable.

"Did you read the threads about us on laxpower?" Caitlin asked captain and defender Bria Eulitt as the team's bus pulled out of the Hebron parking lot.

"Yeah," Bria said. "Everybody's talking about this game. Are you nervous?"

"Kind of," Caitlin said. "I'm trying not to be, but I still feel kind of funny."

So did Brooke, although she wore sunglasses and pursed her lips into her best poker face while on the bus. Brooke had slept three hours the night before, and she'd taken a Pepcid AC with breakfast this Monday morning after Easter. In her career as head coach, Brooke had learned to treat her stomach carefully. Usually, before big games, she actually felt bile rising in her throat.