With one broad stroke, Notre Dame men’s lacrosse vanquished an archrival and history.
An all-around effort fueled the No. 3 seed Fighting Irish to a 13-9 upset of No. 1 seed Duke in the NCAA Division I Tournament final Monday afternoon before an announced 30,462 at Lincoln Financial Field.
The victory gave Notre Dame (14-2) its first national championship in three finals appearances. The program also ended a run of postseason futility against the Blue Devils, their Atlantic Coast Conference foes.
Duke had defeated the Fighting Irish in the 2010 and 2014 title games — both of which took place at M&T Bank Stadium in Baltimore. Notre Dame had been 1-5 against the Blue Devils in the NCAA Tournament with the last victory occurring in the first round in 1995.
“With being a Notre Dame fan came a lot of heartbreak,” senior goalkeeper Liam Entenmann said. “So to be able to be the team to do it is incredible and it’s an honor. Just looking up at the stands today and seeing [former attackman] Matt Kavanagh and seeing so many guys that helped build this program to what it is and were just shy of winning it all and seeing them with tears in their eyes and smiles on their faces, it’s truly one of the best feelings in my life, to be honest with you.”
Six players scored two goals each for the Fighting Irish. Two attackmen, senior Jake Taylor and sophomore Chris Kavanagh, racked up two goals and one assist each, and graduate student midfielder Jack Simmons — a Lutherville resident and McDonogh graduate who transferred from Virginia — chipped in one goal and two assists.
The key for Notre Dame was a defense that blanketed a Blue Devils offense that had ranked fourth nationally in scoring at 15.2 goals per game. Duke’s nine-goal output was its fewest in a game since a 14-5 loss to Maryland in an NCAA Tournament semifinal on May 29, 2021.
Entenmann made seven saves in the fourth quarter and 18 for the game. And graduate student defenseman Chris Fake limited Tewaaraton Award finalist and junior attackman Brennan O’Neill to one goal on nine shots, one assist and two turnovers.
O’Neill entered the game ranked second in the nation in points per game (5.4), 12th in assists per game (2.4) and 17th in goals per game (3.0).
Even after the Blue Devils opened the second half on a 6-1 run that tied the score at 7 late in the third quarter, the Fighting Irish were unfazed and responded by closing the final 16:01 on a 6-2 burst.
“We really got tested,” said Entenmann, who was named the tournament’s Most Outstanding Player. “At the same time, what Coach said in the locker room at halftime was, ‘It’s a game of runs, and they’re a really good team. So they’re going to go on a run at some point.’ We were bracing for it. We knew it was going to happen at some point, and it just happened to happen right after we came out of the tunnel. But we were ready for it, and we knew that we had to regroup as a unit and move forward, and I think we did a really good job of that.”
The Fighting Irish limited the Blue Devils to only a single goal in the first half. They joined Johns Hopkins in 1977 and 1982, Virginia in 1980 and Cornell in 1988 as teams that had managed just one goal in the first 30 minutes of the title game.
The Fighting Irish are only the fourth team in Division I history to capture the crown after missing the previous NCAA Tournament, joining the 1983 and 2008 Syracuse and 2012 Loyola Maryland squads. In fact, either Notre Dame or Duke would have earned that distinction after both schools had been left out of last year’s postseason.
Notre Dame coach Kevin Corrigan admitted that the snub galvanized the team, but took umbrage with the term “revenge.”
“From the moment we didn’t get in the tournament last year, we said, ‘Hey, two things. One, we think this is unfair, but life is not fair. And two, the only reason this happened is we left ourselves vulnerable to this happening, and that’s on us. So we’re not going to [complain], we’re not going to call people names, we’re not going to blame other people and everything else. We’re going to say from this moment forward, let’s do what we can do to make sure this doesn’t happen again to us next year,'” he said. “I don’t think that’s revenge. I think that’s accountability and owning up to what you have control of, and that’s what our guys did.”
The Fighting Irish became only the third team in the last 12 years to win the championship after playing in the second of Saturday’s two semifinals. They joined the 2017 and 2022 Maryland squads that triumphed two days after participating in the later semifinals.
Graduate student midfielder Garrett Leadmon, an Annapolis resident, led the Blue Devils (16-3) with two goals and one assist, Graduate student goalie William Helm made 10 saves, but Duke fell short of claiming its first national championship since 2014.
Coach John Danowski noted that the Fighting Irish favored his players’ dominant hands to force them to play two-handed, which he acknowledged was not their strength.
“I thought their defense was doing a really nice job, and I thought we were playing a little timidly as well,” he said. “I thought we were afraid to make mistakes, which happens in this kind of game that you have to learn. When we came out and scored early in the second half, I thought that changed a little bit.”
Leadmon gave Duke a 1-0 lead just 35 seconds into the game when he drove the left alley, turned back to the cage and dumped the ball over Entenmann.
After that, it was all Fighting Irish, who got goals from six players to enjoy a 6-0 run over the final 26:33 of the first half. The burst began with graduate student midfielder Brian Tevlin converting a pass from Kavanagh with the shot clock almost at zero early in the first quarter and ended with graduate student midfielder Quinn McMahon firing the ball from beyond the midfield line into an empty net vacated by Helm to take part in a 10-man ride with 5:27 remaining in the second.
Trailing 6-1 at halftime, the Blue Devils mounted a furious comeback with four consecutive goals in a 3:53 stretch. Even after sophomore attackman Jeffery Ricciardelli converted a pass from Taylor to end a 13:03 drought for Notre Dame, Duke responded with goals from junior midfielder Aidan Danenza and freshman midfielder Charles Balsamo (whose pass ricocheted off short-stick defensive midfielder Ben Ramsey into the net) to tie the score at 7 late in the third quarter.
But the Fighting Irish scored twice in the final 28 seconds of the period. Tic-tac-toe passing between junior midfielder Eric Dobson, senior attackman Pat Kavanagh and Tevlin culminated in Tevlin scoring with 27.3 seconds left. Then Chris Kavanagh curled the left post and used an inside roll against senior long-stick midfielder Tyler Carpenter to give Notre Dame a 9-7 lead with 0.6 seconds remaining.
The fourth quarter belonged to the Fighting Irish. Dobson’s goal early in the frame capped a 3-0 run over a 4:38 span, and even after graduate student midfielder Owen Caputo’s goal about two minutes later ended a 7:10 drought for the Blue Devils to make the score 10-8, Notre Dame rattled off three consecutive goals in a 1:42 stretch to put the game out of reach.
The announced attendance was the 12th largest to watch a Division I final and the most since 2019 when 31,528 watched Virginia defeat Yale, 13-9, at Lincoln Financial Field.
The three-day crowd of 78,094 was also the biggest since 2019, when 101,544 attended championship weekend.
