Yesterday's games between Duke/Pittsburgh and Army/Rutgers was the first women's doubleheader in the Garden in 26 years Why read game reports of the Maggie Dixon Classic when you can read Queenie's fabulous account of the day. Plenty of "color commentary," so to speak:

Terrapins, we need to have a talk about the use of germ warfare in out-of-conference play. I'm *sure* it's just a coincidence that after we play the Maryland Ptomaines, Kia comes up with two awful games and spends part of the second half barfing into an empty Gatorade cooler. Yes, the joys of sitting in the endcourt and having no one shielding the bench. Come on, guys, we share your team colors, can't you cut us a little slack? At least if you're going to use germ warfare, take advantage of it yourselves, don't hand it off to another team to take advantage of!

That being said, Duke did squeeze out a win over Pittsburgh with a last second basket, 51-49. The Panthers had their opportunities to come away with a victory, but the ball simply would not fall. It hurt. Really hurt, said coach Berenato.

"We've just worked so hard so when you come so close to beating a top team, especially one with the prestige and the tradition of a Duke, you have to take it, you have to seize that moment and we didn't seize that moment today.

"And that is why there is extreme disappointment. We had busloads of people come here and people fly in here for this and, four years ago we didn't even charge for our games. So our disappointment was about this whole package, not losing a game. We have had a lot of people who have had faith in us, who have supported us and we feel like we disappointed them. Some things hurt you more in life than others and this hurts."

That being said, you get the feeling that Duke's season is going to be full of games like this -- some they're going to win, some they ain't.

The second part of the double-header featured Army v. Rutgers. Kudos to the Times for having a real reporter at the game. Bill Finley duly notes that CViv was might displeased with her team (her five starters sat through the first 10 minutes of the game) but Rutgers did manage to defeat Army 59-42.

To say the Black Knights were outsized by those in Scarlet would be a significant understatement. Honestly, when I caught a glimpse of two of the Army players as the teams lined up for the halftime ceremony, I thought, "How cool! They've included some local fourth graders in the proceedings!"

To be fair, both players are listed as short and shorter than short.

Army's height was further reduced when their leading scorer, senior Cara Enright, went down with an injury early in the first half. Enright is now the second leading scorer in Army history and spoke about playing in the Classic at the Garden:

"It's an amazing feeling to be here," said Enright. "This is a once-in-a-lifetime thing. It's great to have this experience. It's almost like Maggie is giving this to us."