When two powerful teams meet, the level of competition gets intense. And with that level of intensity comes rougher and more physical play.

That physicality was reflected in Tuesday night’s matchup between the No. 10 Massachusetts women’s lacrosse team and No. 7 Northwestern.

The Minutewomen (9-1) committed a whopping 44 fouls, more than double the 21 fouls per game they commit on average, in their 10-6 loss to the Wildcats (5-3, 1-1 American Lacrosse Conference), while Northwestern added 18 more.

“That’s something that you expect when you go up against two good teams,” Kelsey McGovern said. “Both teams, us and them, going very hard all the time.”

In addition to the normal fouls a total of seven yellow cards were handed out during the game – four to UMass and three to the Wildcats. Minutewoman coach Angela McMahon said the game was called pretty tightly, but felt the high number of foul calls didn’t have too big of an impact on the outcome of the game.

“We need to play a little bit more disciplined, especially with some of our checking,” she said. “But at the end of the day, we were able to still get the ball back and have plenty of opportunities to score.”

While Northwestern got seven opportunities for free position shots compared to the Minutewomen’s two, the Wildcats only converted on two of them, due in large part to strong goaltending from Rachel Vallarelli (eight saves).

“Rachel had a couple great saves,” McMahon said. “(She) really kept us in it early on because they were firing away with a lot of shots and she definitely kept us in it.”

However, Sam Rush said the large number of penalties did have an effect on the pacing of the game.

“When the ball’s stopped and there’s a foul called, the momentum stops. Everyone’s walking around,” she said. “It really affects the momentum, makes the game pretty choppy, but if we could’ve had a more fluid game, who knows what would’ve happened, but I think we just didn’t play well enough today.”

McGovern said coming out of a hard-fought game like this one will help the team as it approaches its first Atlantic 10 conference matchup.

“I think it was something that was good, and something we can use moving forward,” she said. “You know, we’ve played against hard opponents, and that’ll help us with conference play.”

            Jesse Mayfield-Sheehan can be reached at [email protected] and can be followed on Twitter @jgms88.