It was the culmination of a dance weekend, and the stranger loved dancing to the fast music.

Same here. It’s a necessary thing to learn how to use proper technique when the music is going at 280 beats per minute.

We stayed close the next four minutes; about all I could see is the chiffon of her flowing magenta dress and a couple of inches of her pearl necklace because our feet were moving so fast in closed position.

The music ended with an anticipated orchestra hit. We smiled after we hit the break perfectly.

“Thank you,” she said.

But the Americans were able to win 3-0 in a result which was anything but comfortable. I don’t know whether the shock of losing Ali Krieger earlier in this tournament is carrying over, or whether the team felt as though it could mail in a result based upon past results, but this is the kind of result which cannot please Pia Sundhage and the rest of the American coaching staff.

Still, the tipping point has been reached; the No. 1 team in the world will indeed be playing in London 2012 and will need to avoid further injury whilst playing the host team, Canada, in the tournament final.

Ricky Fried’s U.S. team will have back-to-back games this Saturday against the University of Maryland, and back-to-back games the following day against Northwestern.

Yet, only the first game against Northwestern is going to be televised. Wonder if this is going to be a motivational point for the members of Terp Nation?

And in CONCACAF qualifying for the Olympics, it’s a purposeful run for the Americans as they destroyed their pool-play opposition by a combined score of 31-0.

The United States women’s Olympic program has had, historically, a better record than the national team at FIFA World Cups. The Hammers have never failed to make it to the gold-medal match in every Olympics that women’s soccer is part of the competition program, winning three golds and a silver since the inaugural women’s soccer tournament in 1996.

I’m not sure why; the ball and pitch are the same size, the pool of game officials is roughly the same, and the field of teams is about as diverse (albeit smaller, given the fact that a champion is crowned in less than three weeks).

But what could be spurring the U.S. team is the shock penalty-kick loss to Japan in last year’s FIFA Women’s World Cup. It’s a game which looked for all the world like an American victory for long stretches, but there were numerous wasted chances.

This time around, however, those chances are going in. Last night, Carly Lloyd, who couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn last summer, had the hat trick against Mexico. Sydney Leroux and Amy Rodriguez had five goals each in earlier games in this tournament.

But as was the case four years ago in Beijing, the Americans look to go into battle without a major contributor. Ali Krieger tore two ligaments in her knee in the opening match against the Dominican Republic, which opens up questions about the U.S. wing defense.

Of course, Friday night is the tipping-point match. The winner of the U.S.-Costa Rica game goes to London. The loser gets four years to reflect and wonder about what they did wrong.

Three years later, with an interim head coach, one of its best players missing, and a developmental system that is still in the cradle, USA Field Hockey made the decision to pull the men’s team out of a last-chance six-nations qualifier in New Delhi, India.

It’s a shocking fall, to be sure.

And it’s going to lead to much finger-pointing within the American field hockey community that the national governing body of the sport quit on the men’s team while funneling all of its resources — including the former men’s national team head coach — into the women’s side.

“Unavailability of many of the senior players has left the men’s program in a position where our best assembled team has a performance potential well below that required to be competitive in a tournament of this caliber,” said USA Field Hockey technical director Terry Walsh in a prepared statement.

The key unavailability was Patrick Harris, one of U.S.’s best players, and a winner of the Player of the Week award in the Dutch Hoofdklasse. He pulled out of the Pan American Games team citing his work with the Dutch firm Onesails, a custom sail production company.

The announcement of Harris’ non-participation in the Pan Ams, announced on Sept. 16th on the USA Field Hockey website, set off a viral firestorm of Internet speculation on whether there was a split within the team, or whether there was a split between team and coaching staff.

Whatever the case, the all-for-one spirit of the Boys in Blue just three years ago was absent during the Games, and the U.S. team finished fifth.

It’s not the first time in recent history the U.S. didn’t send a team to a particular tournament. A few years back, a women’s senior team was not fielded for a Champions Challenge II tournament, and the lack of rankings points from that event is still hampering the U.S. team’s world ranking.

But this decision is a setback for those (such as this space) who want to see field hockey as a sport for everybody — regardless of race, gender, class, and region — in this country.

The Pew Center released a study today saying that the percentage of adults owning a tablet computer nearly doubled in a one-month period over the Christmas holidays.

It’s an astounding number.

Now, what the numbers don’t say is whether there was a single reason for the purchases — the availability of large numbers of books, or a particularly popular program that might change the market (a “killer app”), or whether the reasons for purchase may have something to do with the marriage of the mobile telephone to the laptop computer as a single digital appliance.

I think it’s the latter, and you’re seeing manufacturers trying to outguess each other as to size, functionality, and features. It could be an interesting next few years as these kinds of devices fall into more and more hands.

But it’s hard to believe that it could be anything other than the latter, given the difficult circumstances that the former Penn State football coach experienced over the last 10 weeks.

His former offensive coordinator, Jerry Sandusky, was indicted on some 50 charges involving taking liberties with teenage boys, and the scandal perhaps did the worst thing possible: turned in on itself trying to find a scapegoat.

As much as some people in the news media punditry wanted to hang Paterno from the highest yardarm, you wonder if the anger was directed at the wrong people.

This space, for one, has blamed the administration of the school for trying to cover for the football team, especially in a 109-word statement that served as a death warrant for PSU president Graham Spanier, PSU athletic director Tim Curley, and PSU senior vice president Gary Schultz.

I get a feeling that, once Sandusky is put on trial, that a lot of people are going to be apologizing about their intemperate words. Regrettably, Paterno is not going to be around to hear them.

Late this evening, there were reports of the death of Joe Paterno in a hospital in State College. It took a spokesman at the hospital and Twitter feeds from family members to refute this report.

Now that information can flit at lightning speed across the globe, it is more important than ever that said news — “the first draft of history,” as it is said — is right the first time.

The fact that so many news organizations ran with this as fact is not journalism’s finest hour.

The random sample that was collected represented approximately 15 percent of all NCAA teams.

In some sports, the numbers are astonishing. While you may be reading about the high alcohol use averages in the game of lacrosse (some 95 percent of men and 85 percent of women players report having had an alcoholic beverage in the 12-month period of the survey date, there is another trend that should be of concern to frequent readers of this site.

Of all women’s NCAA championship sports, field hockey players report the highest percentage of use in the previous 12 months — some 35.7 percent. This compares to women’s lacrosse (30 percent) and women’s soccer (22.8 percent).

The table of social drug use for women’s sports shows varying use of six substances, but there is one notable decline over the last four years: alcohol amongst women’s lacrosse players. In 2005, 92.8 percent of those surveyed reported using alcohol over the last year. Four years later, it was 84.7 percent.

While this makes you wonder if an emphasis on fitness is a reason, it doesn’t explain the simultaneous rise in field hockey players (86.6 to 94.2 percent) and in women’s soccer players (83.6 to 85.7 percent).

I’m not one to moralize on what people can put in their own bodies, but these kinds of trends are ones to watch when it comes to what is happening in our society at large. In many places worldwide, marijuana is now a decriminalized drug which is regulated and taxed.

The one thing is, I’m not sure that in this country, I’d want to be in a car traveling on the same road where a person under the influence of marijuana is coming at me in the other direction. It’s a traffic-safety nightmare in the making.

Today, she died from severe head injuries from the accident.

Freestyle skiing has come a long way from its birth as a bunch of ski bums were less interested in how fast one got from Point A to Point B on a pair of skis than in now stylishly one got there.

The early freestyle skiing events were stunt aerials, moguls, and free skiing, a kind of figure-skating on snow.

The influence of surfing and skateboarding saw the start of half pipe skiing and snowboarding, and big money sponsors helped to start “big air” events which see competitors soaring 20 feet in the air at 80 miles an hour. The safety systems in the sport are not nearly as sophisticated ad they are in other athletic fields of endeavor. The competitors do not wear body padding and most wear open-faced helmets.

In short, this is now an “extreme” pastime with speed and momentum and kinetic energy and impacts that can kill you.

At some point, people in this sport are going to have to ask themselves, “How much is too much?” Perhaps, this may be that moment.