The celebration had begun. Players jumping on top of each other. Fans going crazy. The band striking up the school song.

But it wasn't New Orleans. It wasn't even the regionals. It was Saturday afternoon in Rec Hall and it was the second round of the NCAA Tournament. And worst of all for the women's basketball team, it was James Madison that was doing all the hooping and hollering.

For the No. 1 and East Region top-seed Lady Lions, the 73-71 loss was a bitter end to what had been the most successful of any of its past seasons. The disappointment almost hung over everyone and everything in the building.

"I'm stunned and very, very disappointed," a dejected Rene Portland said in the interview room afterward. "You have to practice hard to play hard and maybe we didn't practice hard enough. If we would have won this, by one point or two points, we would have considered ourselves lucky. Right now, we consider ourselves unlucky."

"We didn't play a very good mental game at all," forward Susan Robinson added.

After guard Tanya Garner's last-second 3-pointer was swatted away by JMU senior forward Jeanine Michealsen, followed by the sound of the final buzzer, the Penn State players dropped to their knees in shock and total disbelief.

It was over.

And all that was left for Penn State was to wonder what went wrong.

-- A 32 percent field goal percentage in the second half.

-- Getting outrebounded 37-36 to a team that had no players over 6'0".

-- At times in the second half, looking disoriented with ill-advised passes and poor shot selection while trying to comeback, from, at one point, an eight-point deficit with 7:05 to play. PSU led by 12 at halftime.

That 20-point turnaround in the initial 13 minutes of that half was the difference. Penn State did cut the lead to one, 62-61 on forward Lynn Dougherty's layup underneath the basket, but that was as close as the team would come.

"We knew James Madison could come back -- they kept going two points at a time," Portland said.

"I know from experience that wearing a favorite's role can weigh heavy," Dukes coach Sheila Moorman said. "I do think that when we got back into the game Penn State started to measure themselves and it's a difficult way to play."

Right now, the thoughts of a 29-2 record, the No. 1 ranking and the Atlantic 10 regular-season and tournament titles are a distant memory. The loss is the foremost thing on the team's mind.

With the expectations placed on the team and within the team itself -- the defeat was devastating. Yet perhaps Portland put it best afterward what the game meant for her team.

"If you don't dream the big dreams, if you don't talk about going to the Final Four, if you don't look at the trophy or talk to the best, you have no clue what the best is," Portland said. "We don't do this to just be an OK team and that's why we're so disappointed right now. We will always dream that way."