NCAA Men’s Lacrosse: Notre Dame weathers Duke comeback, wins title

PHILADELPHIA — Kevin Corrigan knew at halftime Monday that the second half wouldn’t look like the first.

One goal surrendered by his Notre Dame team to Duke in the first half, a shutout in the second quarter, the only empty quarter the top-seeded Blue Devils had incurred this season – Corrigan didn’t need every one of his 34 seasons of experience at the helm to know that wouldn’t happen again.

His savvy and scrappy bunch weren’t under any such illusions, either.

“I told the guys, look, they’re going to come back,” Corrigan said. “We’re not going to hold them to one. They’re going to make some plays and we’re going to have to weather that emotionally and everything else. I didn’t think they were going to score six that way and get back in the game that way, that quickly. But lacrosse is a momentum game. You see swings like that. I didn’t want our guys to be freaked out by that.”

Notre Dame weathered the storm in the third quarter, then counterpunched en route to a 13-9 win at Lincoln Financial Field in the NCAA men’s lacrosse championships. It is the Irish men’s first national title in lacrosse.

Notre Dame, the tournament’s third seed, was in its third NCAA final, the first two losses to Duke in 2010 and 2014. It hadn’t beaten Duke in a postseason game since 1995, early in Corrigan’s tenure. He is the longest-tenured men’s lacrosse coach in the nation.

But that ended behind an effort that was quintessential Fighting Irish. They managed to nullify Duke’s on-paper edge on faceoffs, winning 14 of 24 off Jake Naso, a margin Duke coach John Danowski said felt more lopsided than that. They got an MVP performance from Liam Entenmann in goal with 18 saves. And they had six players score two goals each on a day when Pat Kavanagh, third in program history in points, was limited to just one assist.

“We have games where that’s been a thing, where everyone steps up,” said middie Quinn McCahon, the Malvern Prep grad who scored twice. “It’s not just the Kavanaghs. We have a great group of guys that are skilled and fight hard. Coach always says, when it’s your day, it’s your day. Luckily, we had a wide range of guys who were able to step up and make plays because Pat wasn’t 100 percent.”

McCahon put Notre Dame up with 5:27 left in the first half when he lasered home a goal from the other side of the midline, Duke’s goalie Will Helm out of the cage on a 10-man ride. That made six unanswered tallies from the Irish after Garrett Leadmon, scorer of the controversial overtime winner in the semifinal against Penn State, had opened the scoring 35 seconds into the game.

Notre Dame largely bottled up Duke’s Brennan O’Neill, the Tewaaraton finalist, to just a goal and an assist. The goal came man-up, in a string of four unanswered to start the second half to make it 6-5 after a 31-minute, 29-second gap between Duke goals one and two. Charles Balsamo’s unassisted tally with 1:01 left in the third tied the game at seven.

“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,” Entenmann said. “We were braced for it. We knew it was going to happen at some point, and it just happened to happen right when we came out of the tunnel at the second half. But we were ready for it and we knew we had to regroup as a unit and move forward and I thought we did a good job of that.”

Notre Dame charged back to make it 9-7 after three, Brian Tevlin taking a feed from Kavanagh with 27 ticks left in tight corners, then Chris Kavanagh dodging the crease with six-tenths of a second left in the frame.

“Huge,” Corrigan said of the response. “You’re just taking blow after blow all through the quarter, and then to come back and get two and stretch it back out a little bit at the end of the quarter was absolutely huge.”

Entenmann made three massive saves early in the fourth, one on O’Neill after he split two defenders, then one on Dyson Williams trying to sneak the cage. Duke had been its own enemy in the first half, missing the cage with 18 of its 24 attempts. It adjusted after the break, but Entenmann had answers, and the defense, led by Yale transfer Chris Fake, kept the shackles on Duke’s high-powered attack.

“You give the goalies some credit, but a lot of times the goalie deserves the credit when his defense is playing well in front of him,” Danowski said. “I thought it was a combination of both. I thought their defense was doing a really nice job, and I thought we were playing a little bit timidly, as well. I thought we were afraid to make mistakes, which happens in this kind of game, and you have to learn.”

Chris Kavanagh, Jake Taylor, Tevlin, McCahon, Eric Dobson and Jeffery Ricciardelli scored twice each for Notre Dame. Dobson made it 10-7 early in the fourth, shaking his defender and bouncing one home short-side. Jack Simmons, who won a national title with Virginia in this building in 2019 before grad-transferring to South Bend, stuck a goal off his speedy dodge with 5:06 left, then set up Taylor a minute later.

If there was any doubt that a title belonged to the Irish, whose fans made up a sizeable proportion of the 30,462 in attendance, McCahon ended it by swimming through a double and planting a shot with 3:24 left, making it 13-8 and setting off the celebrations.

“We just dedicated so much time and effort to ultimately winning this national championship, and we really wanted to get it done for the alumni, like Liam said, and especially for Coach Corrigan,” said Pat Kavanagh, one of four brothers to play for the Irish. “For it to actually come to fruition, it’s special. It’s surreal.”