Colin Finnerty, center in green, poses with former teammates after scoring three goals on Duke in a NCAA tournament game at Duke's home field. (Photo courtesy of the Duke Men's Lacrosse Parents Group)

He scored three goals, receiving a hearty ovation from the home fans after each one.

"It was a great feeling to be back with the playoff atmosphere," Finnerty said. "It felt great to be scoring. I was happy to be stepping up for my team.

"It was a lot of emotion with the fans from Duke supporting me. I'm not surprised by their character."

After the game, Finnerty posed with several of his former teammates for a photograph near midfield.

"They're great guys, all of them," he said. "There's nothing but good vibes between us."

Said Toomey: "I hope it's a little bit of closure coming down here. I think there's a piece of his heart that's still at Duke."

Duke defenseman Tony McDevitt said his teammates have special feelings toward Finnerty.

"He played awesome," McDevitt said. "We would like him to not score so much."

All five fifth-year seniors are elite players, led by Danowski’s son, Matt, who won the Tewaaraton Trophy last year as the best men’s player in college lacrosse. He is a finalist again this season, leading Division I with 84 points (36 goals, 48 assists). He is also only 3 points from tying the N.C.A.A.’s career record of 343.

Along with Danowski, the Blue Devils have two defensemen, McDevitt and Nick O’Hara, who were preseason first-team all-Americans. They join midfielder Michael Ward, a preseason second-team all-American, and goalie Dan Loftus, a preseason third-team all-American, as the fifth-year seniors who make the Blue Devils one of the most productive teams ever.

“They’re the best team out there, I don’t think there’s any question about that,” Starsia said. “I don’t mean to discredit anyone else. They’re the best team in the field, and part of it is certainly because of their unusual experience.”

Life is lovely here outside L.A., but one of the downsides (aside from the fact that it takes an hour to get across town to a TV studio!) is that too often, you miss wonderful occasions like the 20th anniversary celebration for Elayne Bennett's Best Friends Foundation.

Luckily, the Corner's Kathryn Jean Lopez has covered it here.

The success of Best Friends has played a significant role in proving that young people thrive when they are offered "abstinence education" that is at once deeper and more transcendant than "don't do it or you'll get pregnant or contract an STD."  When sex education becomes about something more than putting condoms on bananas -- and treated as a part of overall character education -- the results are amazing.

President and founder Elayne Bennett's motto for the Best Friends Foundation is: We must offer our children our best.  If we do, they will surely respond with their best.

She is so right.  We get what we expect from our children. 

God bless Elayne Bennett for her hard work and high expectations.  They have made a great difference in the lives of so many.

Michael Barone has a column out on Douglas Feith's War and Decision in which Barone makes the important point that we are just now beginning to understand the decisions that followed 9/11 and led to the successes and the setbacks since, and that Feith's book is an important insider account of those years.

I will be visiting the Hoover Institution as a Media Fellow next week, and am watching Peter Robinson's magnificent interview with Thomas Wolfe as prep.  I will dragoon Peter to co-host as much of the show as he can be persuaded to do next week.  Howard Mortman and Victor Davis Hanson will also be about, so a fine week of broadcasts ahead.

It will be the week of decision on the polar bear listing, one of those controversies of which the MSM is barely aware but which has far reaching consequences for American industry and economic growth.  Like the civil war raging in Lebanon (Michael Totten has the best coverage of course) or the heparin not-quite-effective-recall or the Rezko trial, the MSM doesn't understand the many moving parts of a complicated story like the push to list the polar bear as threatened, and is staffed by folks of truncated curiosity which combines with contempt for their audience to produce hours and hours of nonsense.  FNC works to bring panels of smart people of differing opinions together to discuss complicated subjects for decent stretches of time, as does CNN occasionally, but generally it is a wasteland on cable and worse on the big 3.  Talk radio and C-SPAN are pretty much alone in allowing someone like Jindal to appear and discuss many subjects for a half hour or more, which is why radio is the most powerful form of serious media left. (C-SPAN doesn't make much of an effort to add pacing, but it is still valuable beyond belief, as when it airs the full Michelle Obama speech.)

How can the world's most advanced economy blessed with an explosion of technology produce such genuinely mediocre broadcast news day after day?

Why doesn't Peter Robinson's interview with Tom Wolfe air on some channel?  Why isn't there a fast-paced but comprehensive program covering the polar bear debate, or featuring Totten or Michael Yon explaining what they saw going on in Lebanon or Iraq?

The answer of course is that broadcast execs don't believe such programming is possible or that it would bring them ratings (and that PBS is so institutionally left-wing as to have no clue about building an audience of other than Bill Moyers groupies.)

Oh, and here's the first online anti-Obama superstore.