ST LOUIS -- It appeared to be inevitable, not just from the beginning of this tournament, but throughout the whole season. Pat Cummins and Tommy Rowlands were going to meet for the NCAA heavyweight championship, no matter what.

Rowlands looked the part of a champion all season, with his only hiccup coming against Cummins in February. Cummins, on the other hand, looked wobbly at times, especially toward the season's conclusion, losing three of four matches during the run to the postseason.

Despite the doubters, the cream rose to the top in the end. The pretenders fell by the wayside and there stood Cummins and Rowlands, face to face in the 2004 NCAA tournament's final match, ready to settle their feud once and for all.

For all of its build up, the match was anticlimactic. Rowlands simply wrestled a perfect match.

Rowlands hit two takedowns in the first two periods and rode Cummins with more determination than he ever had before. Cummins, for his part, never let up for a second, but he just couldn't get past the defense of the two-time national champion.

"I tried to come out aggressive, but he caught me off guard and got a quick takedown," an extremely disappointed Cummins said in the bowels of the Savvis Center minutes after the match. "He was just tough tonight."

Going into Saturday night's match, Cummins and Rowlands had met eight times, with six of the meetings won by Rowlands. But the fact that Cummins had earned a split in the last four matches represented a new phase in the series. Cummins, the unheralded prospect from Lititz, had caught up with Rowlands, the thoroughbred destined for success.

In the end though, Rowlands was just too much for Cummins to overcome and Penn State suffered its second agonizing loss of the night.

"Everything else aside, I'm pleased with getting to the finals," Cummins said. "But there's just always going to be this 'what if?' But there's nothing I can do about it now."

After he lost, Cummins was consoled by former Lions heavyweight and two-time national champion Kerry McCoy, now an assistant at Lehigh.

"He told me to just be proud with how far I've come and how tough it is just to get here," Cummins said. "He also said some things just aren't meant to be."

After the final, Penn State wrestling coach Troy Sunderland admitted that Cummins had been sick the whole tournament, vomiting all night on Wednesday and again Friday night.

It was hard to tell, though, the way Cummins wrestled coming into the final. After scoring two major decisions in the opening rounds, Cummins faced Oklahoma State's Will Gruenwald in the quarterfinals. Gruenwald scored the first takedown, but Cummins remained calm, got his own takedown and the bout moved to overtime where Cummins hit a low double leg to give the Lions their second semifinalist. In the semifinals, Cummins faced the third seed, Matt Feast of Penn.

Cummins avenged an earlier loss by countering a Feast shot and driving in for a takedown of his own on the way to a 3-2 win and a berth in the finals. When Sunderland addressed a handful of reporters following Cummins' loss, he looked particularly distressed. Two of his wrestlers had just lost in the NCAA finals, a feeling that Sunderland, twice an NCAA runner-up, knows well.

"It's something they'll never forget," he said of Cummins and Josh Moore. "Whenever someone brings up the NCAA Tournament 10 or 15 years from now, they'll still think back to tonight. The only thing I can tell them is that it hurts less with time, but not much."