Dash

Matt Dash won't be playing his final football game during the SJFCA Adam Taliaferro All-Star Classic June 30 at Rowan University. Neither will Rondell Gilmore-Lane. But like their teammates, the two athletes will be wearing their high school helmets for the last time. Dash and Gilmore-Lane will be playing quarterback for the last time, too. "It will definitely be a special game for me," Dash, a Willingboro senior, said Sunday during an introductory gathering for the 82 players and their parents at the Rowan University Student Center.

INDIANAPOLIS - Texas A & M's defense was good enough to upset two No. 1 seeds. It will find out tomorrow night if it is good enough to win a women's national championship when the Aggies face Notre Dame, a 72-63 upset winner over Connecticut. Sydney Colson drove the length of the floor and found a cutting Tyra White for a layup with 3.3 seconds left to give the Aggies a thrilling, 63-62 victory over Stanford last night. The teams traded leads five times in the final minute, capping A & M's remarkable rally from a 10-point deficit in the final 6 minutes.

CLEARWATER, Fla. - There is a thin line between being picky and holding high standards, between being constructive and being critical, between dwelling on the negative and looking for places to improve. We in the media tend to straddle that line on a daily basis, particularly when it comes to a team whose checking account has raised expectations to heights never before seen. While focusing on a multitude of legitimate questions that surround this Phillies team - the ailing right knee of Chase Utley, the injured shoulder of Brad Lidge, an offense that endured some epic stretches of impotence last season - we can sometimes ignore an important fact: Things can go better than expected, too. During a Grapefruit League finale that served as little more than a prelude to the flight back North, the Phillies seemed intent on proving just that.

Eric Hamrick's dream of winning a medal in the NJSIAA state individual wrestling tournament ended Tuesday at Our Lady of Lourdes Medical Center. Hamrick, a Collingswood 140-pounder who visualized himself standing on the podium at Atlantic City's Boardwalk Hall on Sunday, suffered a ruptured appendix, according to his father, Ron. "I can't tell you how disappointed he is," said Ron Hamrick, Collingswood's athletic director. "He worked his whole life for this, so it's pretty bad. "I feel really bad for him. He did everything he was supposed to do, and it was taken from him quickly.

Rashawn Anderson had his own cheering section in Tuesday's playoff game at South Philadelphia High School. One of the many signs held by spectators read "Shawnee Rest in Peace. " And moments after the buzzer sounded, giving Roxborough High School a dramatic 55-53 overtime victory, one of the team's student managers held high Anderson's blue-and-white No. 12 jersey, which had been draped over an empty seat during the game. Anderson was supposed to have been on the court, too, racking up points as he usually did. Instead, his teammates voted to play the game in his honor.

Apparently, Ohio has Temple's number. With heavy rain falling for most of the night at Lincoln Financial Field, the Owls faced Ohio in a game both squads needed to stay alive in the race for the Mid-American Conference East football title. And for the second straight year, the Bobcats ended the possibilities for the Owls. This time the final score was 31-23. The loss snapped Temple's four-game winning streak, and gave the visitors their seventh victory in a row. "They didn't beat themselves," Temple coach Al Golden said.

Donte Waters began yesterday as a free man - albeit he was out of jail on bail facing charges of simple assault and recklessly endangering another person. By late morning, however, things started to fall apart for the 21-year-old Tacony man. He showed up at 10:40 a.m. for his 9 a.m. domestic-violence trial, and Municipal Judge Gerard A. Kosinski wanted to know why he was late. While being grilled by the judge, Waters said his bus had broken down. The judge didn't buy it. "I don't play with people who are late," Kosinski said during an interview.

Their assignment: Write, arrange, record, and produce a song. In 20 minutes. Inside a recording studio near Center City, with its muted light, giant speakers, and massive control board of color-coded dials and buttons, 20 students scramble into groups of singers, rappers, songwriters, producers, executives, and engineers. The aspiring big-name artists and moguls are in the studio for a day - part of a seven-week summer program to teach them what it takes to make it in the music industry.

BEVERLY HILLS - From one angle, the new fall network dramas appear about as numb as they come: Four cop shows, three lawyer shows, one cop-and-lawyer show, and a medical examiner all muscle for space amid the 16 new series. But a deeper look reveals quite a bit more originality, as fall 2010 takes an escapist feel on TV. Many of the standard genres are turned in a catchy direction. ABC's Detroit 1-8-7 is filmed entirely on location. CBS is remaking Hawaii Five-O . And among the seven shows outside the TV-drama mainstream, two are about glamorous spies, one (The CW's Nikita )