For most teams that won the NCAA's 88 championships during 2004-05, just owning the title is enough to crown a storybook year. But for 10 of those champions, the fairy tale was a little more perfect this year -- they can call themselves "undefeated."

In Division I, the Johns Hopkins University men's lacrosse team, Northwestern University women's lacrosse team, Stanford University women's tennis team and the University of California, Los Angeles, women's water polo teams all finished their seasons with perfect records. In Division II, Armstrong Atlantic State University's women's tennis team broke the longest winning streak for an NCAA team in any sport when it capped an undefeated season with a victory over Brigham Young University, Hawaii, in the championship match.

Also in Division II, Stonehill College's women's lacrosse and Seattle University's men's soccer teams finished the season unbeaten, though Seattle did have one tie. Division III teams that finished with perfect records include Salisbury University field hockey and men's lacrosse and Linfield College football.

Most coaches don't start off their seasons with the goal of going undefeated, and many don't even talk about it when it looks like it might happen.

"Our goal was to win every single game that we play, not necessarily to go undefeated," said UCLA women's water polo coach Adam Krikorian. "I know to a lot of people it sounds like the same thing, but in my opinion, when you're trying to go undefeated, a lot of times you end up playing not to lose. When you're trying to win every single game, you can look at it more on a game-to-game basis."

Going undefeated wasn't on the collective minds of Salisbury's field hockey team.

The Sea Gulls just wanted to repeat as national champions. Finishing last fall 22-0 was an added bonus in the run to back-to-back Division III championships.

"One thing that helps us be successful is that we work hard at keeping the kids focused game by game," said Salisbury coach Dawn Chamberlin. "We're not looking ahead or looking behind in terms of records. There was a lot of media attention about us going undefeated, and our winning streak. We tried to tone that down, because it's just extra pressure. We worked hard at looking at one practice at a time and that was going to get us where we wanted to be in the end."

Some teams didn't even have a national championship as a goal at the beginning of their stellar season. After it didn't qualify for the 2004 Division II Women's Lacrosse Championship, Stonehill set a modest goal of putting its name in the championship bracket this spring.

Stonehill, which won the 2003 national title, used the disappointment of not being in the field as the driving force behind all its work in an off-season and preseason that eventually led to this year's 21-0 championship season.

"Not in our wildest dreams did we have expectations like that," said Stonehill coach Michael Daly. "We wanted to make it back to the NCAA championships. It was from the players and the coaching staff. We came back with a determination to have a very successful season. We had no anticipation of going undefeated."

The team's approach mirrored the philosophy of fellow New England coach Bill Belichick, leader of the National Football League New England Patriots.

"I try to keep everything short-term with our team. We just want to be 1-0 today. If we can go 1-0 today, then we're happy. Nothing carries over," Daly said. "If you start thinking about the big picture, you get lost looking at records and you miss being the best team you can be on a particular day. That's the most important thing."

Going undefeated is something that many coaches don't strive to achieve. Some -- even coaches who finished the 2005 season unbeaten -- believe that a loss can teach something you can't learn from a win. In her book "Raise the Roof," University of Tennessee, Knoxville, women's basketball coach Pat Summitt wrote that losing could be good, serving to toughen her team.

"Losing strengthened you; it revealed your weaknesses so you could fix them. That's why Tennessee played at least 20 ranked teams every season, because we believed a schedule that tested us would prepare us to win it all in the end," she wrote.

Armstrong Atlantic State's women's tennis coach Simon Earnshaw believes in Summitt's philosophy -- but says the loss his team learned from came at the end of the 2004 season.

It was a determination to avenge that stinging loss last year to BYU-Hawaii in the championship semifinals, and the lessons the loss taught the team, that helped Armstrong Atlantic State team to its storybook finish in 2005. Earnshaw said his players regrouped and learned that experience is important in big matches.

"From that one loss, they could see -- even though it was a hard loss to take -- what it was going to take for us to beat them," Earnshaw said.

A long wait

The Northwestern women's lacrosse team carried home a national championship to an institution that hasn't claimed an NCAA title in any sport since 1941. The lacrosse program, elevated from club status to varsity level at Northwestern just four years ago, brought the school its second title ever -- men's fencing provided the first in 1941.

At the time of the victory over defending champion University of Virginia, Wildcats coach Kelly Amonte Hiller, now a member of the U.S. World Cup Lacrosse Team, said, "I have no words for this team -- they are such an amazing group of women, and for me it is so special to be a part of this team. The reason why we are here today is because our women are such good people and they are so coachable. They have worked hard to get here and earn this honor, and they deserve this."

The Johns Hopkins men's lacrosse team finally fulfilled what many saw as the program's destiny when it won its national title earlier this year. After entering the Division I Men's Lacrosse Championship as the No. 1 seed for the fourth consecutive time, the Blue Jays finally exorcised past demons with a perfect 16-0 season.

Johns Hopkins is perennially one of the top lacrosse programs in the nation, having appeared in 16 championship games, but national titles are hard to acquire. All the previous disappointments were washed away this spring after the final seconds ticked off the clock as the Blue Jays defeated Duke University, 9-8, on May 30 in Philadelphia.

A record crowd of 44,920 in Philadelphia's Lincoln Financial Field watched Johns Hopkins become only the third undefeated Division I national champion since the NCAA began sponsoring the championship in 1971.