The Ivy League title hopes of Harvard, Columbia and Cornell all rest on Penn.
All four of those teams are tied for second place in the Ivy field hockey standings at 4-2, but it is the Quakers who take on 5-1 Princeton on Friday at Franklin Field.
A Tigers victory will ensure that they will be the champions of the 2007 season and garner the Ivy League's automatic NCAA Tournament bid. It will be 'game over' for everyone else.
But a Penn win will give hope to the other three and leave the final decision open to tie-breaker scenarios.
The League will pull out a slew of tie-breaking sequences to determine who among the 'co-champions' gets the NCAA bid.
Princeton and Penn would be in the running, as would the winner of Harvard-Columbia on Friday night.
But there's more - 4-2 Cornell plays Dartmouth on Saturday and a Big Red win would force a four-way logjam for first place. Head-to-head competition would be the first way to break the tie.
In that scenario, Penn, Cornell, Columbia and Princeton would be 2-2 against potential first-place finishers. Harvard would finish with three wins against the top teams if it takes down the Lions and would thus get the NCAA bid.
But Harvard could be knocked out of the mix if it loses to Columbia. In that case, if Cornell beats Dartmouth, then the Big Red, Penn and Columbia would all be in contention at 2-1, and Princeton would be sent packing.
The next step would be to look at those squads' head-to-head results against the fifth place team, which would be the loser of the Harvard-Columbia game, again assuming a Cornell win.
If tie still exists after all that, it will be broken with a drawing by Jeff Orleans, the Ivy League Executive Director.
But again, none of those scenarios mean anything if Penn does not beat Princeton first, Friday night at Franklin Field.
Coach Val Cloud doesn't want her team to get lost in all the commotion.
"Right now the team's priority is winning the game on Friday, and we will see what happens with the playoffs," she said. Princeton is "a team we have to beat, so we should have no problem coming ready to play."
But if the Quakers can pull off an unlikely win - and it wouldn't be the first time - they still have a long, convoluted road ahead of them.
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