The Duke Blue Devils took home their second Men's NCAA Lacrosse National Championship after rallying to defeat the Syracuse Orange on Memorial Day Monday after coming back from a 5-0 deficit in the second quarter of the game.
Duke came together with four goals from Jordan Wolf, while both Josh Offit and Josh Dionne had four goals in the 16-10 victory, giving Duke a 16-5 record for the season. Duke coach John Danowski won his second career championship with the Blue Devils, while Brendan Fowler was named most outstanding player in the tournament after helping the team rally from behind with his play on face offs. Without Fowler's work on the face offs the team likely would not have been able to rally back from its deficit, as he won 13 straight and 20 of 28 overall to help Duke take the lead eventually. The Blue Devils started off on a cold streak and missed scoring on their first 11 shots before scoring 10 of the last 13 goals in the contest.
The Orange started off strong with Dylan Donahue who scored three goals, while JoJo Marasco tried to push it in the fourth with two goals in less than 40 seconds to get the score back to 13-9. The last eight minutes of the game saw four more goals but only one for the Orange and after Offit gave Duke the lead at 8-7 in the third, the team never gave it back. Duke ended up scoring the next seven goals and used that to propel to victory in the 10th matchup between the two teams.
Syracuse still leads the matchups 6-4 overall, but the last three times it has been Duke on top and it was the fifth time ever that the schools have met in the NCAA Tournament and the first in the final game. Syracuse ended up 16-4 and now Duke has the title as the best lax team in the nation after the tournament.
"We just wanted to get one in, and once that happened, we knew we would get comfortable," Duke's Jake Tripucka said. "We knew if we let that hole get any bigger, we knew we weren't going to be able to climb out of it. But we had faith in Brendan. We knew he was going to get the ball back for us."