From The Sun's Katherine Dunn:

Anyone who counted out Severna Park’s field hockey team from contention for a regional championship just because the Falcons lost three regular-season games is — to put it mildly — looking a little foolish.

The Falcons haven’t won more state championships than any other hockey program -- 16 to date – by folding in the face of adversity. The bigger the adversity, the bigger the motivation to overcome it.

Tuesday night, they proved they could come back with a vengeance by upsetting No. 1 and Anne Arundel County champ Broadneck, 4-1, in a Class 4A East regional semifinal.

Now, the No. 5 Falcons take aim at another team that beat them during the regular season — No. 2 South River — in today’s 3:30 p.m. regional final at South River.

Lil Shelton, the only head coach the Falcons have ever had, said her players didn’t like hearing the scuttlebutt that they were done enough for the fork after losing three games in a single season for the first time since the early 1980s.

“It was tough for them, but they never let down at practice,” Shelton said. “They would have team meetings on their own to talk about it. I don’t know exactly what they talked about, but they want that state championship. They don’t like being the underdog and so many people said to them, ‘You are doing terrible this year. What happened to Severna Park?’ Every article that was written said how we weren’t in the county championship. That really wore on their nerves and they said, ‘We’ll come back.’”

The Falcons are snared in a Catch-22: winning just about all the time makes the rare losses big news. When the perennial No. 1 drops to No. 5, that gets attention.

“It’s not (the current players’) fault the bar was set that high and some of you all (the media) are doing that. They inherited that bar up there and they’re trying to live up to that,” Shelton said.

South River, with its exceptional defense, will be a high hurdle for the Falcons, but don’t count them out of what should be a close game, maybe even a shootout. Still, win or lose, the Falcons already have had a season the vast majority of local teams would envy.