CARY, N.C. — On Sunday, either Duke or Penn State is going to be crowned a national champion for the first time in program history.

The 90 minutes (or more) that stand between now and that moment are going to be a fascinating tactical battle, as both teams look to leave everything on the table and look to cash in down in Cary.

Whether it’s Penn State’s fantastic defensive record in the NCAA Tournament or Duke’s tremendous counter attacking approach, the similarities run deep between the two programs that already played once this season.

“It’s interesting to watch these two teams right now because I believe in many ways they are a mirror image of one another in terms of the growth that we’ve both experienced,” Penn State head coach Erica Walsh said. “Duke also being a very young team, with a lot of dynamic pieces… We will be facing a team with a little bit of different tactics than we experienced in University Park [back in September].”

Duke head coach Robbie Church echoed those sentiments.

“Both teams have really attacked, both teams have really defended well, both teams have good goalkeepers,” he said. “We expect a very tight game, very close game. We’re going to come out and do what we do.”

Margins in national finals are razor thin. The smallest errors, missed clearances or the tiniest mental mistake can be the difference between celebration and disappointment.

Duke’s approach will be no secret on Sunday. For the fourth straight game, the Blue Devils are the underdogs, and will look to the tactical approach that has gotten them this far: sitting deep, hitting on the counter and defending doggedly. Church is optimistic that game plan also provides an advantage to his side when they play a second high-level game in three days.

“Being able to hold back, being able to stay nice and compact, being condensed, has definitely helped us,” he said. “It took us awhile because if you look early in the season we struggled a lot on Sundays. But later in the season we have really, really done well on Friday-Sundays, Thursday-Sundays. Hopefully that will help us tomorrow, so I think that, the adrenaline, playing in the national championship, hopefully that combination will be able to get us through in such a short turnaround.”

The regular season schedule prepared Penn State for that challenge. The Big Ten conference slate features mostly matches on Friday and Sunday, not to mention the fact that the team secured a Big Ten tournament title with the same approach.

"We have honed our rotation, in terms of substitution patterns over time, throughout the course of the season,” Walsh said. “We have a really good sense of which players will need more of a breather after a lot of minutes on Friday. Certainly, it will play a role, but the strength of this team all season long has been the depth and we are really proud of the players coming off the bench and strength of this 26-man roster. I feel much more comfortable than 2012 going into that national championship game with the players we have coming off the bench.”

Simply by making the title bout, Duke has navigated a schedule that’s featured the SEC champions, Pac-12 champions and ACC tournament winners. Each program possesses both variances and similarities in the final third.

Duke defender Christina Gibbons expects a similar challenge to Stanford and Florida State.

“There’s not one person who sticks out like a Savannah Jordan, but you know that every single person on their front line is a quality player, especially in the midfield as well,” she said of Penn State's attack. “So I think we need to take the approach that every single one-v-one is going to be a battle, every single matchup is going to be a battle that we need to win. Nothing really changes aside from the fact that it’s a different team, but we go into it knowing that we always want to have a two-v-one defensively, we always want to have each other’s back and work for each other."

Whether those battles are won or lost is likely to go a long way in determining Sunday’s winner. Taking Duke's approach into consideration, Walsh knows that scoring the first goal of the game could prove decisive – not to mention the ability to scrap for every yard.

“Against a team that puts a lot of numbers behind the ball, you’ve got to make it happen,” she said. “This game can be cruel sometimes, we’ve seen it so many times, it owes you nothing, so you’re going to have to figure out a way…these guys are just going to have to gut it out.

“It’s not going to be pretty sometimes, as Frannie Crouse showed [against Rutgers], sometimes you’re going to have to scrap around. That’s been something that this team has really embraced, we can play the beautiful game, and at the same time, walk off the field with our jerseys dirty, sleeves rolled up and those hard hats on, with a blue collar mentality that has defined this team throughout the second half of the season.”