Two straight upsets in a week seemed like a strong possibility throughout the game, but Penn State just did not have enough to overcome the deficit at the end.

The Penn State women's lacrosse team (5-5, 2-0 American Lacrosse Conference) lost a heartbreaker to No. 2 Loyola (10-0), 15-14, in Baltimore, Md., on Saturday. Penn State will stay in Baltimore to play Johns Hopkins at 4 p.m. today.

The Nittany Lions came into Saturday's game riding high after upsetting No. 9 North Carolina last Sunday and were looking for their first two-game winning streak of the season, but fell just short.

"It was a good physical battle," Penn State women's lacrosse coach Suzanne Isidor said. "It was typical Loyola-Penn State fashion."

The Lions trailed the entire game and faced their biggest deficit at 15-11 with 15 minutes remaining. Although seemingly down and out, the Lions battled back to get within one, at 15-14 with over seven minutes on the clock. That was where the game would end, as the Greyhounds gained possession and stalled for the rest of the contest, Isidor said.

The Lions were led by senior tri-captain Colleen O'Hara, who notched four goals on the day, but it was the fifth that never came that the Lions really needed from their leading goal-scorer.

Overall, Isidor was happy with her team's attack, especially considering that the Greyhounds had only been allowing 5.5 goals per game coming in, an incredible number for lacrosse.

"Our attack worked hard to find the openings in their defense," Isidor said. "They did a great job."

Attacker Katie Jeschke chipped in with three goals on the day.

It was not the scoring that did the Lions in, but their costly turnovers. It was not so much the fact that the Lions committed 11 turnovers, because Loyola matched that total, but the Greyhounds capitalized on almost every Lion miscue.

"The one thing we learned from today is that we have to limit the turnovers," Isidor said.

"We have to capitalize on the ones the other team makes. We didn't have many, but the ones we did have Loyola made us pay for."

The loss dropped the Lions back to the .500 mark as they failed for the fifth time this season to win back-to-back games, something that is starting to wear on them.

"We were hoping to break that streak today," Isidor said. "Now we hope to keep it going. [Today] is such a huge game; we have to get back on the winning track." Making the game more important for the Lions is the fact that today's game is a conference matchup, and Isidor said it could determine the champion. Today's game against Johns Hopkins (6-2, 4-1) will feature two of the top three teams in the conference. The Lions are going to have to forget about Saturday's loss and turn their collective attention to the task at hand, which is splitting yet another pair of games.