All season, Nicole Garbin has been the pillar of strength behind the Oregon women’s soccer team. The sixth-year senior and team captain had been around when the Ducks had been the laughing stock of the conference.
Like so many of the upperclassmen on the current roster, Garbin knew what it was like to lose. As Oregon picked up momentum and started winning, Garbin promised herself that she would do whatever it took to get Oregon to the national tournament.
She got the team dancing in the locker room before games- to the beat of Lil’ Wayne’s “Fireman” – she made the freshmen sing on the bus, she talked to the media, she ran around with keys when she scored, she kept the intensity up, she kept things fresh, and fused this team together into a single, seemingly indestructible unit. But most importantly, she kept the goals coming,
To see Garbin emerge from the locker room on Monday night struggling to keep it together and to keep up a strong front after what must have been the most disappointing half hour of her life was absolutely heartbreaking.
She kept the brave face up while fielding routine questions about how she felt at the moment and what was going on in the locker room.
But when I asked her what it felt like to have played in her last match as a Duck on Sunday without knowing that it had been The Last One, the mask cracked.
Garbin’s brown eyes pooled with tears. Professionalism be damned, I wanted to cry with her.
“My ultimate goal was to get to that tournament,” she said, her normally steady, confident tone now shaky. “Like I’ve been telling all the newspapers, it wasn’t really going to mean anything, all the records, until we got to that tournament.
“I tried my best out there to get the team to the tournament.”
And they didn’t make it.
After everything she had done, six years of breaking records and making history, all Garbin had wanted was to lead her team to the postseason – something that had never been done before in the program’s history. All she could think about at that point yesterday afternoon, with the spotlight in her face, was that it hadn’t been enough.
They’d come so close. Only to have their miracle season thrown back in their faces by the NCAA tournament selection committee.
But while Garbin understood that on one level, on another level, I’m sure it seemed to her as if she had failed. Despite everything she’d done, Oregon wasn’t in the tournament, and at that very moment, that seemed to be all that mattered.
It’s gut-wrenching. For four inches of column space, I’m ditching my objective-journalist persona for my dumbfoundedly-outraged-human one.
With that in mind, I’ll say that the Ducks got shafted by the selection committee. And that’s bullshit. This team beat No. 3 UCLA, held its own in its loss to Stanford, killed USC and tied California. Don’t give me the argument that their non-conference schedule wasn’t up to par. They deserved to be in that tournament.
Garbin and every member of that team did everything they could to get there. And all they got in return was, oh wait, nothing.
Instead, the greatest player in Oregon soccer history played her last game in an Oregon uniform on Sunday without knowing it.
Nicole Garbin never got to say her last goodbyes. How do you create closure when someone has just blown a big gaping hole in your heart?