Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, March 23, 1990 TAG: 9003231744
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RANDY KING SPORTSWRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
An older woman at the Greensboro Coliseum tried to warn the Virginia coach.
Fifty minutes before game time, Allison sat down in Seat 1, Row B of Section 119 of the cavernous double-deck coliseum.
As the coach sipped coffee and scribbled down game notes on a legal pad, the woman walked up and shoved her ticket stub in Allison's face.
"Sir, you're in my seat," she tersely told Allison. "Could you move, please?"
Allison grinned. At first, he thought the old woman was kidding.
"Well, this is my seat!" she said again.
"Unbelievable," said Allison, who picked up his coffee and pad and moved into empty Section 120.
The odd quirk of fate simply characterized the theme of a playoff series in which nothing went right for Allison and the Lancers.
If Dave Allison wasn't a firm believer of Murphy's Law a week ago, he's now a confessed, flag-toting member of the pessimist sect that contends "whatever can go wrong will go wrong."
"Old Murph is right," Allison said. "I know. I'm a witness."
In a best-of-five, first-round playoff series they figured to win easily, the Lancers were methodically eliminated in four games by the upstart Greensboro Monarchs.
For a Virginia club that had spent much of the ECHL regular season in first place, the postseason dunking was hard to accept.
"We're a better team than Greensboro is," Allison said, "but Greensboro played like it was possessed or something. [The Monarchs] could do no wrong."
Meanwhile, the Lancers could do little right against a team they had skated circles around in the regular season, winning seven out of eight games by a 43-22 margin.
Where the Lancers overconfident?
A day before the playoff started, Allison, in as many words, suggested the ECHL could mail in the series' results.
"We will beat Greensboro; I'm sure of it," he said at a LancerLot news conference.
And why not? The night before, the Lancers had thumped the Monarchs 10-2 in the regular-season finale in Vinton.
No contest. At least the Lancers thought so.
"Looking back, I think the 10-2 game may have given us a false sense of security," Virginia captain Bill Whitfield said. "And because of that, we might not have taken them as seriously as we should have."
Meanwhile, the aroused Monarchs were dead serious. They proved it in the series opener, when they stunned the Lancers 3-2 in Vinton to set the tone for the rest of the series.
"Winning the first game was big," Greensboro coach Jeff Brubaker said. "We proved to ourselves that night that we could beat this team."
Virginia took Game 2, 5-4 in double overtime. It took a short-handed breakaway goal by Dan Richards to end the 89-minute, 13-second marathon.
The series moved to Greensboro for Games 3 and 4. But things would only get worse for Virginia.
In Game 3, the Lancers ran into a veritable stonewall - Monarchs goaltender Wade Flaherty. Greensboro won 3-1, the game-winning score coming on defenseman John Blessman's first goal of the season.
Then came the woman and Game 4. Greensboro jumped to a 4-1 lead, then staved off a furious Virginia offensive assault in the final six minutes to win 4-3.
After taking the fall, the Lancers shook their heads and tried to explain what happened.
"We have more talent than they do, but they were the better team in this series," forward Chris Lindberg said. "Their goaltenders played really well, but so did ours. But you can't win scoring one or two goals a game.
"Let's face it, our goal scorers didn't come through. I'm supposed to be a goal scorer myself, and I didn't come through. A lot of us didn't come through."
Brubaker and the Monarchs did.
"Give 'em credit," Allison said. "Brubaker and that bunch did a hell of a job."
As his team showered and an equipment man gathered the sticks to load on the team bus, Allison sat alone in a folding chair in a nearby coliseum runway.
This time, nobody wanted the coach's seat.
by CNB