And then there was one.

The Penn State women's cross country team finished fifth at the Mid-Atlantic Regional, Saturday at Lehigh.

The Nittany Lions aspirations of making the journey to Furman, SC., was shattered for everyone except Michelle Wale. Wale will be the lone Penn State representative at the NCAA Championships a week from today.

Wale finished 10th overall, with a time of 21:15, and she finished third among the runners whose team did not qualify for NCAA's, earning the individual trip.

Wale joins a very elite group of runners who qualified for NCAA's, as a freshman, including All-American Kathy Mills, the American record holder in the 5,000-meter.

"I went in to it (Mid-Atlantic Regional) with the intention of qualifying," Wale said. "After a bad race at Big Ten's, I wanted to come back and do well. I planned to come off line hard and just go. Everything seemed to unfold as I planned."

Georgetown dominated the regional, by placing the top four runners. The Hoyas outscored fellow Big East rival Villanova 22-69. Bucknell finished third scoring 129 points. LaSalle edged out the Lions by one, 135-136.

"No one expected LaSalle to really be in the hunt, but they performed really well and beat us," freshman Chelsea Lenge said.

Princeton finished sixth with 157 points. West Virginia (230), Navy and Pittsburgh (245) and Pennsylvania (253) rounded out the top 10.

Georgetown teammates Marni Kruppa and Jill Laurendeau finished simultaneously in 20:34.31 seconds taking a share of the individual regional crown. Georgetown's Erin Sicher finished third and teammate Amanda Pape finished fourth. Sicher finished the 6,000-meter course in 20:50, and Pape crossed in 20:52. The first non-Hoya to finish was Villanova's Kalin Todenbausch in a time of 20:53.

The Lions had six of their seven runners perform as well as they have all season long. The only one who performed poorly on Saturday afternoon was Chelsea Lenge. After running as Penn State's second runner all year she did not finish the race at the regional.

With Lenge having such a disappointing effort someone had to step up and fill in for Lenge, and that person was Maureen Thomas. Thomas finished 22nd overall and in a time of 21:43 seconds. She was named to the All-Mid-Atlantic Region Team, along with Wale.

"She (Thomas) ran very well," Penn State women's cross country coach Beth Alford-Sullivan said. "She dropped a lot of seconds off of her time. She ran toward the top and in the front pack in the race. When we needed someone to step up, she was the one to do it."

As the season comes to an end for all but one of the Lions, the team was filled with mixed emotions.

"We're disappointed with a fifth place finish. Lenge really hurt us, otherwise we could've finished third," Alford-Sullivan said. "Six of our runners competed very well, and at a high level. We cut our score from a year ago by 75 points, which is remarkable."