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We almost have our answer. After more than three months and thousands of games, we are one weekend away from knowing the identity of this season's best team. We'll come one step closer Friday when No. 1 Texas A&M plays No. 2 Virginia (ESPNU, 5 p.m. ET) and No. 1 Florida State plays No. 1 Stanford (ESPNU, 7:30 p.m ET).
But until the list of contenders is trimmed to two, what questions remain for the four semifinalists?
1. Will Florida State's first championship come by way of Iceland?
Florida State has plenty of homegrown standouts who need cross only county borders to reach campus. Floridian defenders Kristin Grubka and Kirsten Crowley and holding midfielder Michaela Hahn anchor a defense that has allowed fewer goals than any team in the College Cup. Fellow in-stater Carson Pickett's 13 assists this season need no translation in speaking to her value as a crosser of the ball. Local can be good. But this is Mark Krikorian team, and that means an array of passports unlike any other elite college program, seven countries in all represented this season.
Such global reach has been the case for the Seminoles since Krikorian arrived, as it was for the University of Hartford in his previous college coaching stop. So it will be only fitting if one of those international imports leads Florida State to its first national championship. It will also be Dagny Brynjarsdottir's way to stamp herself the best of the bunch.
Florida State's international contributions run deep this season. Outside backs Megan Campbell and Emma Koivisto missed time early because of national team commitments, but it's no coincidence that the team has been essentially impenetrable, three goals conceded in the past 16 games, since they lined up alongside Grubka and Crowley on a full-time basis. Not to mention that Campbell's long throws (you'll know them when you see them on ESPNU) give the team a tool no opponent can match. Isabella Schmid pairs perfectly with Hahn in the back of the midfield. Marta Bakowska-Mathews and Berglind Thorvaldsdottir have scored 21 goals between them, mostly in reserve roles.
But as her fourth and final season winds to a close, the team takes its shape around Brynjasdottir.
At its best, Florida State operates with a professional quality, both in an efficiency and precision of play and a detachment that smooth out the emotional highs and lows of any game. Brynjarsdottir is front and center on both counts, silky smooth with the ball at her feet in tight spaces and an Icelandic Abby Wambach in the air but also calm, cool and collected on the big stages. Whether directly by a pass to the forward playing in front of her, indirectly by a run that opens space or simply the attention she draws from opponents, she is the fulcrum of the attack.
Everything about her suggests a higher level of soccer. And for good reason. In terms of women's soccer, someone with 48 caps for Iceland really has been there and done that.
A little more than a year ago, before even Virginia's Morgan Brian ever played a game for the United States senior national team, Brynjarsdottir lined up for Iceland opposite iconic names a decade or more her senior like Norway's Solveig Gulbrandsen and Germany's Nadine Angerer in the European Women's Championship.
'Before the first game, I've never been as nervous in my life,' Brynjarsdottir said. 'The night before, I could barely sleep, I could barely eat. I've never been as nervous. After the game I remember walking off the field thinking it was only a soccer game, I didn't have to be that nervous. So now, after that game and the other games after in the European Championship, I wasn't nervous at all. Now I'm never nervous anymore.'
She won't have the opportunity to play in next summer's World Cup after Iceland failed to qualify, but she does have an opportunity to leave North America with a championship and a permanent home in Tallahassee soccer lore.
2. How will the ride end for Stanford's seniors?
Stanford's seniors would like to define their career with bookend national championships, but at least for now, the picture that might best sum up their time with the Cardinal came as Kendall Romine placed the ball on the penalty spot during Friday's quarterfinal between the top-seeded Cardinal and second-seeded Florida Gators.
Romine, who was on the field for all 90 minutes of the national championship game against Duke in 2011, has experienced the gamut of good and bad with the Cardinal, or at least good and painful. She was actually a redshirt freshman when she earned that starting role as a defender on the program's first championship team, having missed the entirety of what should have been her freshman injury. She missed four games during that championship season with an injury and almost half the subsequent season with another injury. Her mind is in fine shape, if the degree in international relations she earned this past spring is any indication, but the game has taken its toll on her body.
And there she was Friday night with her career hanging on the ficklest of football fates in a quarterfinal penalty shootout against Florida. First to the spot for Stanford, despite having scored all of two goals in more than 70 career appearances (albeit one a penalty), she drilled a ball that gave Florida goalkeeper Taylor Burke no chance to make a save. Two more seniors, Lo'eau LaBonta and Haley Rosen, converted their kicks, and sophomore goalkeeper Jane Campbell, who saved a penalty and also converted the clincher for the Cardinal, took care of the rest.
After piling up 10 one-goal victories en route to the quarterfinal, Stanford found a way to cut it that much closer.
'It's been a tough road,' Romine said. 'I have so much appreciation this year because it is my final year at Stanford. It's not easy to get to the final four. In a way I was pretty lucky coming in to a dynasty and my first three years at Stanford made it to the College Cup. It wasn't until last year where it really hit me that this is something that you do not take for granted. You fight as hard as you possibly can to get there.'
Making the College Cup was fast becoming a birthright for Stanford players when Romine arrived in 2010, and the rest of the current seniors followed a year later. The trip to the final weekend was much a part of the experience as the bikes most used to get to practice and around campus.
So while 15 wins and a third-round appearance might represent a job a well done for most programs, the 2013 season that produced those results left the Cardinal with more time on their hands around Thanksgiving than they wanted.
As Romine pointed out, bringing it back to what it was before got a boost from new talent, particularly midfielder Andi Sullivan, captain of the United States Under-20 national team and a freshman who plays like a senior, and Campbell. Three of the five players who saw the most time on one of the nation's stingiest back lines will return next season. The Cardinal don't rely exclusively on their seniors, but by volume alone, Romine, LaBonta, Alex Doll, Hannah Farr, Chioma Ubogagu and Taylor Uhl are likely to make the difference one way or the other against Florida State.
And the class that experienced more adversity than most of late can also be the first to leave with two titles.
3. Will Texas A&M play to its talent or its inexperience?
One thing fans are all but guaranteed to see when Texas A&M takes on Virginia in one of Friday's semifinals is Aggies senior Shea Groom sprawled on the Bermuda grass in Boca Raton, catching her breath and making sure all her body parts are still attached after a tumble. Odds are we will see her there more than a few times.
Partly because the tumbles bring such an abrupt end to her gliding runs and partly because the 5-foot-6 attacking midfielder is a wisp of an All-American, it's somehow all the more noticeable how often opponents clatter into her.
She notices, too, the toll of four seasons all the more evident the mornings after games.
'It's really tough,' Groom said. 'After four years of this, your body, you've got to start taking a little bit more care of it. So I've learned how to manage that a little bit better. ... For me, this year it's been a little bit more by acting like a professional and really just being professional about everything I do. It's better knowing that we won.'
She will be a professional, too, the 16 goals and seven assists she has this season just the most recent evidence of the converted forward's ability to play at a higher level.
'By taking her off of the front line and putting her into an attacking midfield role, where she could receive the ball with the game in front of her and with space to use her athleticism was a really good thing that fit her skill set,' Texas A&M coach G Guerrieri said.
All of which is worth remembering when it comes to the College Cup's newest entrant.
Not only the lone program making its College Cup debut but also the only team with a current roster that includes no experience with the season's final weekend, Texas A&M arrives in Boca Raton as an outsider. It is not Cinderella.
A lack of experience isn't the same thing as a lack of talent.
Only twice since North Carolina won the first ever NCAA tournament did a team win the national championship in its first College Cup appearance (although as with all things about women's college soccer, that's partly because those same Tar Heels made such a habit of keeping the trophy for themselves). Florida did so in 1998, and USC matched the accomplishment in 2007. Much more common, as in the cases of Notre Dame, Portland, Santa Clara, Stanford and UCLA, among others, is the sometimes slow process of learning the hard way. Other than USC, the last team to even win a semifinal in its first appearance was UCLA in 2000. And it took them more than a decade to improve on it.
Texas A&M has its work cut out for it against a Virginia team that has played brilliantly in the postseason and boasts a slew of talented stars. But whether it's the unique blend of size and athleticism that Annie Kunz offers as a target forward, the technical savvy of Kelley Monogue in midfield, the speed of Bianca Brinson on the flank or the toughness of Meghan Streight on the back line, Texas A&M earned its No. 1 seed.
Opponents bring down Groom in such spectacular fashion because it's often the only way to stop her.
4. Will defense be the difference for the nation's best offense?
A rematch of last year's semifinal draw decided in penalty kicks, the quarterfinal between No. 1 UCLA and No. 2 Virginia was both the latter team's chance for redemption and women's college soccer at its best (that it took place as early as the Elite Eight was the selection committee at its worst). The highest scoring offense in Division I did its part for the Cavaliers in a 2-1 win on the road. Sure, the visitors didn't match their average of better than three and a half goals per game on the season, but the two goals they put in the back of the net in Los Angeles, courtesy of Emily Sonnett and Morgan Brian, accounted for a third of those UCLA conceded all season.
The game was so good in large part because Virginia, as was the case all season, was so poised in possession and committed to go forward that even on the road against an all-time stingy defense, it dictated the terms of the contest.
Yet after UCLA's Caprice Dydasco slipped in a goal from a difficult angle in the 74th minute to cut her team's deficit in half, Virginia's College Cup hopes still came down to whether or not its defense was up to the challenge.
Which is about where the season began for this team.
The Cavaliers returned Brian, Danielle Colaprico, Makenzy Doniak, Brittany Ratcliffe and a good deal more across the midfield and forward lines from last season's juggernaut, but they had to replace three defenders and the holding midfielder from that team that claimed the No. 1 overall seed. Scoring goals was never going to be the issue.
'The question for us was really how do you replace three players that have played for a long time together?' Virginia coach Steve Swanson said of departed defenders Shasta Fisher, Molly Menchel and Morgan Stith. 'It was good to start with Emily Sonnett. We didn't have Kristen McNabb for the tournament last year, and that was a big blow to us. We didn't have many injuries last year, but that [knee injury] was critical to us. I think she's had a great year silently; she does a lot for us. It's been nice to see those two, Emily and Kristen, develop their relationship.'
Partnered in the middle with a redshirt sophomore in McNabb, flanked by sophomore transfer Tina Iordanou and freshman Megan Reid and in front of sophomore keeper Morgan Stearns, Sonnett is as valuable as any defender in the College Cup, especially with how much she also plays a role in the team's attacking personality.
For the entire team, maintaining the balance that Sonnett personifies between the desire to always go forward and the responsibility to defend will be everything in Boca Raton. As was the case in the quarterfinal, neither Texas A&M nor any potential championship game opponent is likely to put 10 players behind the ball and play for penalties.
As the minutes ticked away Friday and the Bruins threw everything forward, Ratcliffe, who barely left the field long enough to catch her breath when her shoulder popped out of place a week earlier in a collision, put her body in front of a shot at close range. Colaprico, playing the same kind of distribution-minded, forward-looking holding midfield role that Lauren Cheney plays for the national team but doing it at 5-foot-3, won a ball in the air against the much taller Sam Mewis and temporarily stalled the Bruins in their tracks.
And Virginia held.
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