Duke And Penn State Perfectly Cast As Women's College Cup Finalists

— -- CARY N.C. -- So often the favorite in the Big Ten, Penn State played that role superbly against a familiar foe.

So long the underdog in the ACC, Duke took down a champion it knows all too well.

If the College Cup semifinals served as auditions for Sunday's national championship game, consider the roles well cast.

Playing against the nation's stingiest defense, and a conference rival with which it split games before the NCAA tournament, No. 1 Penn State pushed and pushed until No. 2 Rutgers broke. The Nittany Lions advanced to their second championship game in four years with a 2-0 win.

Playing the defending national and current ACC tournament champion, not to mention a team that entered with 10 consecutive shutouts in the NCAA tournament, No. 3 Duke absorbed until it had all the room it needed to counter attack in a 2-0 upset win against No. 1 Florida State.

Just about the only thing either did wrong all night came when Duke's bench stormed the field prematurely after Toni Payne's goal with one second remaining supplied the exclamation point.

By then it hardly mattered. Maybe the soccer wasn't perfect, but the execution of plans was close. How close?

"Pretty close," Duke coach Robbie Church allowed with a grin.

So a No. 1 seed that has outscored the competition 19-0 in the tournament will face a No. 3 seed that went on the road and beat the SEC and Pac-12 champions just to earn the chance to dethrone the reigning national champion in front of 11,676 partisan fans not far from Durham.

As nothing illustrated so well as the result that followed later in the evening, it isn't easy to play the role Penn State did in the first game.

A month or so into Frannie Crouse's college career, Penn State coach Erica Walsh described her then-freshman forward as, at least from a distance, something of a bull in a china shop. She was fast, strong and fearless. You just hoped it all went in the right direction.

A little more than a year later, Crouse was more a bull on a chess board. And she had company in blue and white.

Penn State was the better technical team. It was the athletically superior team, especially in its speed across the forward line. But it wasn't so much better on either count as to assure anything against an opponent that was technical enough, athletic enough and, more important, was as well disciplined and committed to defending as any team in the nation, on this night and all year.

The answer to the puzzle had little to do with desire, about Penn State wanting to win more than Virginia did a week earlier in a stalemate against Rutgers. It had everything to do with math. The more opportunities to score, the more likely to score. Penn State had to pressure, suffocate and harass Rutgers into mistakes. The Nittany Lions couldn't settle for controlling possession in midfield. They had to attack to defend.

"We have a standard that we set, and each game we try to go above that standard and keep that standard throughout the whole game," Crouse said of Penn State's work rate. "I think coming from club and just lower levels of soccer, you aren't expected [to do] that all the time. You can slide by because you're playing teams that aren't as good."

Almost as soon as the opening whistle, Crouse was sprinting toward a Rutgers player who was just trying to settle the ball and probably her nerves. Nor was Crouse alone. Minutes in, Megan Schafer charged toward a Rutgers player after the ball was played short to her on a goal kick. Unsettled, the opponent had to step away from the pass that was her first choice and play up the sideline instead, soon squeezed into playing the ball out of bounds. Each time Penn State pressure forced Rutgers to play the ball out of bounds, a cheer went up from the bench.

In the 24th minute, a Rutgers player near the sideline in her own half was denied a chance to go forward and instead played the ball backward. But the pass was struck too hard and bounded away into open space in the 18-yard box. A lurking Crouse surged forward like a long jumper on the runway, reached the ball half a step ahead of Rutgers defender Brianne Reed and, sliding as she shot, chipped it over the goalkeeper.

"I saw that they were going to play the ball back, and I kind of felt like I was cherry picking," Crouse said. "Unfortunate for them, they mishit the ball or misjudged how hard they hit it, and I just kind of went in and took it."

Penn State has wonderful technical skill. Even as Rutgers focused on disrupting the interplay between midfield playmakers Raquel Rodriguez and Emily Ogle, meeting with more success than most, Penn State coach Erica Walsh said the ability Rodriguez showed to escape pressure on the night was unlike "anything I've ever seen." Yet the plan couldn't be to rely on that to eventually produce a goal; it had to be to force the issue.

And even if she was as much the beneficiary of the pressure as the supplier on the first goal, Crouse's night embodied that. She sprinted at the opening whistle. She sprinted for the loose ball. She jogged across the field at halftime. When it was over, she ran to the other end of the field to celebrate. Walsh said the beauty of this team is how well the pieces play their roles. Crouse certainly played hers.

"The development and evolution of Frannie Crouse has been really impressive," Walsh said. "And it's a testament to her commitment to learn and her commitment and desire to improve, not only on the field but spends a lot of time watching video with our assistant Ann Cook. And she's just a student of the game. She's been asked this year to play in a bit of a different role towards the end of the season here, play as more of a wide player, which, to be honest, fits a lot of her strengths really well. ...

"She embraced it, and she's grown with it and, as far as I'm concerned is now one of the best wide players in the country."

Penn State never gave Rutgers the opportunity to show what a good defensive team can do if left to its own devices.

Duke offered a demonstration of what that looks like not long thereafter in the second semifinal.

"The way the game was going, if we had played another hour, I don't know if we would have scored or not," Florida State coach Mark Krikorian said.

Despite missing the NCAA tournament a season ago, Duke probably safely ranks as one of the 15 to 20 best programs in the country over a long period of time. But its fate is also to, almost every season, be the underdog in the ACC, sometimes behind only one or two teams and sometimes, as was the case this season, behind seven teams in the regular-season standings.

The result is a team that is both very talented and nonetheless very familiar with defending and countering.

So it was that after some early heroics from goalkeeper E.J. Proctor gave the Blue Devils time to find their footing, they soaked up Florida State's possession and crowded the middle of the field with bodies. But unlike Rutgers, Duke had both the time to launch its counters when Florida State finally ceded possession and the players up front who could make use of the acres of open space.

Payne got her own goal when she sprinted end-to-end in the closing seconds, but she set up the goal that mattered most on a counter in the 32nd minute. After a long stretch of possession, Florida State couldn't stop Duke from working the ball out. Surrounded by four Florida State players just beyond the 18-yard box, Payne slipped a pass to Karla McCoy. The latter's finish to the far post came at the same end of the field as the last goal Florida Stare conceded in the NCAA tournament, UCLA's overtime winner in the 2013 title game. This one proved equally fatal.

Florida State had more of the ball. It had more shots. But all night long, those Duke runs stretched it thin.

"That's one of the main reasons we can sit back a little bit is our counter attack," Church said. "We have dynamic attacking players. And it's very, very tough if you sit back and then you cannot counter. But with the pace of our players and the ability to beat players one-on-one ... especially with teams that open up, very big possession teams, there's going to be seams for us and spaces for us to attack in. We've really worked hard on counter attacking."

Penn State yet again played just like a favorite should. Duke yet again played just like an underdog must.

It's only fair to let them settle things on the field Sunday.