Saturday night was Senior Night at Maples Pavilion, but it was the underclassmen that stepped up and helped send the class of 2011 out in style with a 3-1 victory over No. 13 Pepperdine in the last regular season home game of the year.

Freshman outside hitter/middle backer Eric Mochalski had a career-high of 11 kills and hit .611 with no errors, and junior outside hitter Brad Lawson notched his second straight double-double with 19 kills and 10 digs while hitting .341 for the match.

The No. 3 Cardinal (17-7, 13-6 MPSF) came out strong, hitting .478 in the first set and jumped all over the Waves to take game one, 25-15.

But things leveled out in the second set as Stanford’s attack cooled off and Pepperdine rebounded. The two teams traded points for most of the game, with neither side gaining much of an advantage until Stanford used a Lawson kill to move to set point at 24-23.

But the Card couldn’t convert and failed to capitalize on two subsequent set points with Pepperdine (5-13, 5-13), who eventually took the set on two blocks by Matt Pollock and Maurice Torres.

The setback seemed to jolt the Cardinal’s offense back into gear, and Lawson and McLachlin stepped up their games in the third set–Stanford nearly doubled its hitting percentage from game two to game three. With McLachlin serving, Stanford won four straight points and held a slight lead midway through the set.

The lead grew to four points at 20-16, but Pepperdine refused to quit despite offensive woes–the Waves hit just .216 for the match and hit below .135 in games one and four.

It wasn’t until Lawson slammed home one of junior setter Evan Barry’s 50 assists on set point number three that the crowd of 1,268 could exhale. Playing with a 2-1 lead, the Card appeared to loosen up a bit, but couldn’t shake Pepperdine and the balanced offensive attack of Pollock, Torres and Cory Riecks, each of whom had at least 10 kills, with Torres tying Lawson for the match high at 19.

Stanford slipped into a 13-10 hole, but slowly worked the sideout game to retake the lead at 15-14. With the crowd’s support, the lead swelled to three, and then a late surge gave the Cardinal the set and match, 25-20.

Fittingly, it was the senior McLachlin who put away the final point as his father, assistant coach Chris McLachlin, looked on from the bench. In addition, the victory moved Stanford’s graduating class of McLachlin, Ian Connolly, Max Halvorson, Charley Henrikson and Jordan Inafuku (as well as redshirt junior Garrett Dobbs) within two victories of the all-time mark for career victories in school history, with 79.

But the celebratory atmosphere Saturday at Maples Pavilion contrasted with the tense and volatile tone of Friday night, when a showdown with No. 1 USC had a rowdy crowd of 1,645 on edge. USC (17-1, 16-1) pulled out a 3-1 victory in the end, but after a dominating first set by the Trojans, a late-arriving crowd energized Stanford as they battled back to take the second set 25-21 and seized the momentum.

USC’s combination of Tony Ciarelli and Steven Shandrick led the team. Ciarelli led all players with 21 kills and hit .500 with four aces and eight digs, and Shandrick hit .474 with 10 kills and eight block assists. The duo helped the Trojans overcome what was otherwise a quiet offensive night for the team. All-American Murphy Troy hit just .059 for the match with eight kills, and USC hit just .290 as a team (compared to Stanford’s .305), but picked its spots well.

With Stanford down 18-17 in the critical third set, Ciarelli smashed through the Stanford block to give the Trojans a three-point cushion that they would not relinquish. It was Shandrick who blocked Lawson for set point.

The Cardinal took a three-point lead in the fourth set at 12-9, but USC proved why it has lost just one match all year as it chipped away and eventually took its first lead since the opening point at 22-21. A few blocks later and the Trojans were heading to the busses with their 11th straight win, but the match showed that Stanford can hold its own against the best in the country.

The Cardinal is still in a tight race with BYU for the No. 2 seed in the MPSF and controls its own destiny by virtue of its series sweep of the Cougars. With just five matches remaining in conference play, Stanford heads south to face UC-Santa Barbara on Friday night.