It was an up and down week for the Raider women’s lacrosse team. On the upside, the Raiders’ 14-6 dismantling of Lafayette on Saturday afternoon earned the team its first Patriot League win of the year in impressive fashion. On the downside, there was a sloppy 14-11 loss to the Big Red of Cornell on Wednesday evening in a game the Raiders had circled on their calendar. With the Cornell loss, the Raiders are 7-3 as they enter the heart of Patriot League play.Colgate entered the game against Lafayette confident and energized, having defeated the Leopards in each of the last three years. Its confidence was quickly put to the test, however, when Lafayette scored a goal just 38 seconds into the game to give the Leopards the game’s first lead. Nonetheless, the sudden momentum swing did not concern the Raiders. “We came out with so much energy,” junior tri-captain Kelly Winning said. “We just needed to channel it and relax a little and I knew we would beat them.”Winning led the Raider charge, tying the score at one with an unassisted goal with 26:20 remaining in the first half. Winning would rack up five points on the day, scoring four goals and adding an assist.Less than five minutes later, first-year Jess Van der Meulen scored the first of her three goals to give Colgate the lead for the first time.After that goal, the Raiders never looked back. Another Winning goal at the 11:51 mark set off a flurry of Raider scores, giving Colgate an 11-2 lead when the smoke had cleared.Midfielders Katie McVeigh and Megan Janson put the Raiders up, 5-2, going into intermission, and the Raiders quickly built on their lead in the second half. Junior Eden Haladay’s quick unassisted score was followed by two goals by Winning and one each from McVeigh and sophomore Tara Casey.”It seemed like we just kept building on the momentum,” Winning said. “The defense would make a great play and the attack would capitalize on it. We were really working hard for each other.”I think we needed a game like that to show other teams how great our attack is and how we have many different people that are able to get the job done.” In goal, junior Sue Bielamowicz stopped eight Leopard shots and allowed only four goals, earning her Patriot League Defensive Player of the Week honors. Through Saturday’s game, Bielamowicz lead the Patriot League with a 7.28 goals against average.But Bielamowicz and the rest of the Raiders had very different results against 14th-ranked Cornell. Behind five goals from first-year standout Courtney Farell, the Big Red soundly beat the Raiders in a game that was not as close as the final score indicates.McVeigh and Winning kept the Raiders in the game, scoring three goals apiece on the evening. Colgate tied the game at two early in the first half on a Van der Meulen goal at the 17:01 mark, but it was as close as the team would come – the Raiders never had the lead.Cornell went on a 9-2 scoring run, including five in a row in an explosive five-minute period in the second half, to take a 13-5 lead that would prove insurmountable.The Raiders staged a furious comeback, scoring six of the game’s final seven goals, including two from Winning.The Raiders eventually pulling within three on junior Heidi Ross’ free-position shot with 1:46 left in the game. But Colgate would not score again and left Ithaca with another loss to the Big Red.The Raiders will host Bucknell tomorrow at noon, looking to keep alive a 12-game Patriot League winning streak that dates back to 2003.