THE FACEOFF: 2013 America East Tournament Infographic

Every Division I tournament. Every team. College Crosse has it all on lockdown. Please send cookies and naptime. Today we're slashing to bits the America East Tournament.

If college lacrosse was boring and didn't have these conference tournaments, Albany would already have made arrangements for the NCAA Tournament after running through the America East. The Great Danes would be taking jogs around the Capital Region; the Thompson Trio could've even sold out John Fallon Field with an exhibition skills competition to pass the time. Alas, college lacrosse doesn't work that way. Instead, the Great Danes will have to fight off some conference foes to earn the right to have a May adventure.

Albany -- who has a pretty good chance at making the big prom (it is prom season after all, and you can see lacrosse's journey as the cousin to basketball's "big dance") -- will face a combination of three teams that definitely need an auto-bid to get into the NCAA Tournament: Hartford, UMBC, and Stony Brook are all May-negative at the moment, and their path to extra lacrosse is contingent upon their performance on the North Shore of Long Island. The league will stream the two semifinal games today, but ESPNU has the championship game on Saturday -- a 10:00 A.M. start time presumably put in place so that fans can beat the traffic on the L.I.E. out in Suffolk County. THE FACEOFF is here to break down the matchups and give a little history of the America East Tournament.