The University at Albany men's lacrosse team came into Friday afternoon's game against Princeton winless and having lost four straight by one. The Great Danes almost played another one-goal game, although the one against the Tigers was much different.

Albany held Princeton to just two goals, including one with 8.6 seconds to play, as the Danes rolled past Princeton 10-2 in front of 617 at John Fallon Field. The game was played in temperatures in the high 20s, with winds gusting to near 40 miles per hour.

The game was the 300th at Princeton for head coach Bill Tierney, who is now 220-80 with six NCAA titles and 13 Ivy League titles in 21 seasons with the Tigers. Princeton was 117-183 in the 300 games before Tierney's arrival. 

The current Tigers, ranked 11th by both the coaches and the media, fell to 2-3. Albany is now 1-5 after opening with a five-goal loss to Johns Hopkins and then the four one-goal losses, three of which were to ranked teams.

Mark Kovler scored both Princeton goals. Corey Small had four goals for Albany.

Alex Berg won 12 of 16 face-offs for Princeton.

Albany was an NCAA quarterfinal team a year, when it finished second in Division I in scoring offense with nearly 14 goals per game. This year, Albany had not reached double figures in any of its first five games.

With the wind howling and the field frozen, Albany struck first, scoring on a Steve Ammann goal 6:16 into the first quarter. The Tigers answered on Kovler's first with 4:22 to play in the quarter, but Princeton would not score again for 49:14, by which time it was 10-1.

The Danes began to take control when Small and Kyle Crotty scored 28 seconds apart to make it 3-1 after one. Small then scored the only goal of the second quarter to make it 4-1 at halftime.

Neither team scored in the first 11 minutes of the third quarter, but Small and Jordan Levine began to break the game open with goals a little more than minute apart to make it 6-1 after three.

Princeton managed three shots in the second quarter and only one in the third.

The lead grew to 10-1 as four different Danes scored in the fourth. The Tigers finally scored again when Kovler took a feed from Scott MacKenzie on an extra-man opportunity and scored just before the game ended. If nothing else, Kovler's goals stretched his streak of consecutive games with at least  two points to eight.

Brett Queener, the dynamic Albany goalie who plays midfield in extra-man situations, made 10 saves.

Princeton hosts Rutgers Tuesday night and Yale Saturday, March 29, in its Ivy League opener.