If this year’s spring break is anything like last year’s, the women’s lacrosse team might prefer to stay home.

A year ago, on their return flight from West Palm Beach, Fla., the JetBlue plane carrying the team fell apart like a ’78 Ford Pinto. The engine cover flew off and hit the side of the plane, causing it to dip and the lights to flicker.

“I felt like for a second we were going to die,” senior goalie Emily Brooks said.

It was one of those whole-life-passing-before-your-eyes kind of moments. A “call your family and tell them you love them because you might not make it” type of deal. It was a scene straight out of Almost Famous, except no one came out of the closet.

Just like in a Hollywood script, the plane returned to West Palm Beach and made an emergency landing with all its precious cargo physically intact, albeit emotionally shaken.

As team-building exercise, this experience beats trust falls hands-down. Go through something like that with someone and you’ve got yourselves a pretty tight bond.

“I was still getting to know people, and now a lot of the girls are some of my best friends,” sophomore Kassie Garfield said. “I wouldn’t say that was the only reason, but it helped.”

The hardest part of the whole ordeal may have been getting on the next plane heading to JFK International Airport just two hours after their emergency landing.

“I remember how tough it was to get everyone on that plane,” Brooks said. “We almost had to rent a bus.”

That flight, however, landed safely in New York, and Brooks’ mom was waiting with sandwiches for the entire team.

Today, the women’s lacrosse team’s near-death experience has turned into something of a laughing matter, and it started on late night TV the very next night.

“We were watching TV the next night, and Jay Leno was making fun of how the IC lax team almost died,” senior captain Suzy Lull said.

It wasn’t long before the team followed suit. At last year’s senior banquet, they bought tiny airplanes at the dollar store, wrote Jet Blue on the sides and broke off the wings. They then hung them from the ceiling, signifying the healing process was more or less complete.

This spring break, JetBlue has given vouchers to the team to pay for the returning players’ trips back to West Palm Beach. As for the freshmen, Garfield knows they’re wise to some of what happened a year ago, if not everything.

“I think they have a pretty good idea,” she said.  

Hopefully it stays an idea.