Baltimore – There were hugs, handshakes and plenty of tears. The Duke men’s lacrosse team had run through myriad emotions over the past 14 months, and now it was over.
The Blue Devils had an almost unfathomable comeback fall short in a 12-11 loss to Johns Hopkins in the NCAA championship game Monday, and afterward their locker room was eerily silent.
No team had ever experienced what Duke had endured. The Blue Devils never even got the chance to finish their 2006 season, and then made it all the way back to the title game.
Minutes after the loss, however, that was no consolation.
“Right now I think everyone in here is thinking, ‘Wow, we just lost the national championship.’ In a couple of weeks, maybe we’ll say, ‘Look what we accomplished,”‘ Duke goaltender Dan Loftus said. “But we wanted a national championship. That’s what we came here for.”
It would have been a Hollywood story: Duke completes its emotional comeback season by winning its first national title before a record crowd. But Johns Hopkins wrote its own ending.
“We used it as motivation,” Blue Jays midfielder Stephen Peyser said. “When we first got here, we were the forgotten sons. We said we were going to sneak up on everyone, and when it’s our time, we would show the world what we’re made of.”
Despite the defeat, Duke’s performance effectively eliminated the residue of an agonizing 2006 season that was canceled after eight games.
The Blue Devils fell 9-8 to Johns Hopkins in the 2005 title game, but missed a chance to return to the Final Four in 2006 after a woman hired to strip at a team party claimed she was attacked by three Duke players.
The allegations, which included rape and kidnapping charges, ultimately proved to be false. But the revelation came too late to save Duke’s season or the job of coach Mike Pressler, who watched Monday’s game among the championship-game record crowd of 48,443 while first-year coach John Danowski ran a team consisting of dozens of Pressler recruits.
The Blue Jays (13-4) never trailed in winning their ninth national championship. But they blew a six-goal halftime lead and found themselves locked in a tie at 11 after Duke’s Max Quinzani scored with 4:37 remaining.
Johns Hopkins’ Kevin Huntley followed with his third goal of the game, with 3:25 left, but the Blue Jays couldn’t celebrate until Quinzani’s shot went wide of the goal as time expired.
“I thought it was going in. It must have been an inch and a half wide of that bottom right corner,” Quinzani said.
