BRUNSWICK, Maine-With six seconds left in the second round of the NCAA tournament at Bowdoin College on Sunday, the women's basketball team still had a chance to make history. It wasn't a very good chance: Down by three, ball on the opposite baseline and a stifling Bowdoin defense in between, the Judges had been pushed around all game, only to pull themselves back from oblivion over and over again with their most tremendous performances all season.

Now, in one of the most hostile environments Division III has to offer and their burning-hot three-point specialist Allison Chase '07 sitting on the bench after a questionable fifth foul took her out with 0.4 seconds to go, the Judges still had a chance.

And if there is one thing this Judges team had learned, if there is one manifesto of excellence etched into their collective will by a history of near-misses and disappointing finishes, it is to take advantage of chances.

Whether or not they hit that shot, this was a Brandeis season for the ages. As coach Carol Simon likes to remind everyone, finally making the NCAA tournament after 19 difficult seasons in arguably the nation's most difficult Division III conference, the UAA, was not merely work of 13 undergrads and two coaches. Two decades worth of lessons and improvements all culminated to provide that one opportunity.

"It's just not this group here that's gotten us, but the 19 years before every player's gotten us here to build the program," Simon said after the game.

Like all great coaches, Simon qualifies success in rational and relative terms. "We won the ECAC tournament last year-now lets go out there and make the NCAAs this year." That was the goal heading into the season. Anything less would have been seen as a dismal failure, anything more, incredible.

Slow and consistent improvement has been the name of the game, making the nearly two decades it took to get to this point even more remarkable. But this year's team did not just break through the wall to the long-sought-after NCAA tournament, they smashed it into oblivion with a 4-1 conference run to end the season before their landmark tournament run. If the NCAA tournament is a very exclusive dance, next year's team is already on the guest list for the VIP room.

Students and fans are privileged to be around at a time when we can enjoy the benefits of seeing Brandeis competing at the national level. But the young players are by far the luckiest. They have the fortune of coming to a program that expects nothing less of them than reaching for the highest peak, the NCAA championships, with the history and experience to show them how it's done.

"[The freshmen] expect to win," captain Caitlin Malcolm '07 said. "They expect big things out of their leaders."

In the way that the young players took advantage of every brief opportunity they got to play in the NCAA tournament, it was clear that a new bar had been set. These future stars will not be happy with four year's worth of tickets to the tournament; they want a trophy. And their coach believes they have a good chance.

"When we recruited [the rookies], we said: 'Our goal is to get to the NCAA tournament and win it,'" Simon said. "But it's gonna take work and are you willing to do that?"

The first five seconds of the last sequence of the Judges' second-round tournament loss were a gigantic blunder. After the pass came in, full court pressure forced to call time out with 1.6 seconds left. Capra found the ball way outside the arc on the inbounds and let off a shot a reporter called "desperate" during the press conference after the game. Except instead of being all that desperate, she managed to plant her feet, find an opening and let off a perfect-looking rainbow that scared the crap out of everyone in Polar Bear nation. That is, until it landed two inches too far to the right side of the rim, bouncing back safely.

For a team like Bowdoin, the celebration after the game was extraordinary. They were ranked higher, had played better all game and were really supposed to win. This was a home crowd that had seen their team win 70 straight games at home. But they had given the Judges a final shot that was so damn near perfect and it felt like it should have gone in.

For this year, having the opportunity to take the final shot in the second round of the NCAA tournament was incredible. Next year, it won't be nearly enough.

"I'm happy that we got this far, but I'm not pleased," Malcolm said. "I'm looking to come back next year and take it further and hopefully win a championship. I'd like to do that before I graduate.