If this weekend were a movie, the women's basketball team would surely skip finals and just sit around watching it over and over again until the VCR blew out.
Yup, this weekend's 90-78 upset over Brown (10-4) and the mind-boggling 63-48 comeback win over Yale (6-8) the next night would've really made for a great movie -- complete with some Oscar-worthy performances and a few rocks stars here and there.
The opening scene against Brown was explosive as the Big Green's Bess Tortolani '98 drained an in-your-face triple to light up the scoreboard. The early trey was all Dartmouth (8-5)needed to steal the show as they spiked the lead to as high as 19 in the first half alone.
Five minutes into it, forward Gyvonne Pinkston '99 ignited a 17-4 run by the Big Green as she followed her short range jumper with a steal at the other end and an easy lay-up to cap off the sequence.
Pinkston continued to shutdown the Brown offense as she hustled for six steals and poured in a career-high 19 points to lead the Big Green in both categories.
But the Bears still managed to post a comeback as they rallied back on a 27-11 run late in the first half to cut the deficit to just three points going into the locker room. At the break, the score was 44-41.
In the second half, Brown continued to carry the momentum as Kate Veronneau '00 sank two from line to slice the lead to one ten at 19:50.
Pinkston answered with two points of her own at the other end with a shot from the field to bump the lead back up to three.
At 16:23, Tortolani used another shot from downtown to put the Big Green back in the driver's seat. On defense, it was more of Pinkston playing the good burglar as she snagged three steals in about a minute of play to keep the ball out of the Dartmouth court.
"I think part of our success was that we've played these teams before," Pinkston said. "We try not to make the same mistakes twice and I just tried to anticipate their plays before they happened."
Once the Big Green boosted the lead back to double digits, the rest was history as the spread hit 17 with seven minutes to go, before settling at 12 at the final buzzer.
All five starters for the Big Green ended up in double scoring digits while Pinkston and Erin Rewalt '99 each tallied a double-double on the night as they hit the big numbers in scoring and rebounding.
On Saturday, the Big Green came out a bit sluggish as the lead flip-flopped and never stretched beyond five points. At the half, Yale held a meager 24-20 lead.
But the second half was a whole different story. "After the half, we started to switch things up a bit," Head Coach Chris Wielgus said. "We knew we had to expand the court."
In the opening minutes of second stanza, the Bulldogs held their lead and stretched it to six as their star forward Autumn Braddock '99 hit the outside jumper.
But the tide began to turn at the 13:41 mark when sophomore Erin Rewalt drained eight points in the next minute-and-a-half to start a roof-raising 23-0 Dartmouth run to bust open the lead to 17.
The run proved fatal for the Bulldogs as they fell apart and played a haphazard helter-skelter defense for the rest of the game.
Instead of shooting the ball, the Bulldogs kept fouling the Big Green and forcing Dartmouth to hit the money from the freebie strip.
But even that didn't stop the blowout rally as the Big Green went 15 for 17 from the line in the second half.
When the buzzer sounded, Dartmouth walked off with a 63-48 win courtesy a whopping 16 points from Rewalt in only 13 minutes of play in the second half.
"The entire season, we've all taken turns giving the team a little boost on the floor," Rewalt said, "and I guess it was just my turn that night."
Rewalt rattled the rim for a team-high 18 points against the Bulldogs while Jen Pariseau '97 and Nicci Rinaldi '99 each finished with 10.
In the end, the Big Green's homecourt finale couldn't have followed a better script for the three seniors on the squad -- Sally Annis, Jill Marple and Jen Pariseau.
"It was a great win," Annis said after the game. "That's exactly how I wanted to go out -- as a team."
"The beauty of this weekend was that we were all just playing for the sake of playing, and it was a wonderful thing," Pariseau said. "It was sad that it had to come to an end, because I know the players, coaches and fans were all enjoying the moment."
Wielgus, for one, knows that this is a special trio of seniors who contributed more than just buckets.
"I've always felt a special closeness to the seniors since we came into the program together," she said. "The seniors have really set a positive tone for this team and hopefully we can carry on their fine tradition. They're so selfless, and I think they set a great example."
The Big Green will closeout their 1997 season with a match-up against this year's Ivy League champions, Harvard, at Cambridge on tomorrow.
