On the rain-soaked bus ride from the team hotel to Lincoln Financial Field on Monday morning, junior Chris Kavanagh opted for a detour down Memory Lane.
“I was looking at pictures of me and Pat when I was a freshman and a sophomore, and kind of crying for 25 minutes,” Pat Kavanagh’s younger brother and Notre Dame men’s lacrosse teammate said, “knowing it was my last game with 51 — one of the best players, if not THE best player, to ever play here, alongside [goalie] Liam [Entenmann].
“It was a pretty emotional day,” Chris continued, “but we put in the work for a while. And this was the last one we had to get.”
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The three of them helped make sure the two-hour-and-two-minute lightning delay, after the National Anthem and Flyover were performed, was one of the least-memorable details on a day that the Irish men’s lacrosse team stormed to a second consecutive national title, 15-5 over Maryland, in Philadelphia.
It’s just the fourth double-digit win among the 53 men’s lacrosse national championship games (no title game in 2020) and the first since the 1998 Princeton team beat Maryland, 15-5, in that matchup.
“Someone said they have 11 All-Americans,” Maryland coach John Tillman offered. “Felt like it today.”
Chris Kavanagh, named the NCAA Tournament’s Most Outstanding Player, contributed five goals, as many as 36th-year Notre Dame head coach Kevin Corrigan scored as a midfielder during his three-year playing career at Virginia, and also matching 7 seed Maryland’s entire team output on Monday, which equaled a season-low for the Terps.
Grad senior Pat Kavanaugh, in his final game in an Irish uniform, contributed six assists, while Entenmann — the 2023 NCAA Tourney MOP — ended his career with a 16-save performance after giving up two goals in the first 3:25 of the first quarter.
Pat’s assists set a program record in an NCAA Tournament game, while Chris’ goals tied the school mark in a tourney match. Both broke Pat’s 1-year-old single-season school record for points (77), with Chris finishing 2024 with 81 points and Pat with 80.
The top-seeded Irish (16-1), bookending a 14-game win streak with a 14-9 home win over the Terps (11-6), became just the ninth repeat champs in NCAA men's lacrosse and first in a decade. And they dominated almost every phase of the game, including coaxing 16 Maryland turnovers to help offset a rare 17-7 deficit in the face-off game.
Also contributing to that was that Notre Dame was on target literally against one of the nation’s best goalies and 2022 NCAA Tournament Most Outstanding Player, Logan McNaney. The Irish connected on their first 10 shots on goal on their way to a 10-4 command at halftime. McNaney didn’t get his first save until the 13:29 mark of the third quarter
“They're poised and unselfish,” Tillman said of the Irish after Maryland’s 13th runner-up finish in 17 trips to the finals. “They make great decisions. At the other end, they're buttoned up defensively, super athletic. They're awesome in the goal, and they're really, really good at the face-off X. Don't have any weaknesses.
“I knew it would be a big challenge, having played them once before. But then putting on the film and watching them during the year, they are awesome and they are worthy champions. They deserve it. They were better than us today.”
Having two Kavanaghs was too much for everyone to overcome this season except Georgetown on Feb. 25 — an 11-10 overtime upset that the Irish avenged in the NCAA Tournament quarterfinals.
“It’d be hard to overstate the impact that the Kavanagh family has had on our program,” Corrigan said, “and Pat and Chris the last couple of years … it’s why we’re sitting here. … I would include in that [older brother] Matt.
“The last two times we went to back-to-back Final Fours (2014-15) was when Matt was playing for us. That whole family — the competitive drive they have is really unique. And it’s not just on game days.
“It’s a competitive drive to get better, so they’re working on their skills. They’re working on all the things that you need to do to be a great player. It’s the competitive drive that knows that in a game like this you’re not going to be able to do it by yourself, so you better bring everybody along with you. And they do that on an everyday basis.”
Including on Monday bringing along Jake Taylor, who scored a couple of goals, his 40th and 41st of the season. But beyond that it was eight different Irish who scored single goals, including football wide receiver Jordan Faison, with his 22nd, and third-wave midfielder Fisher Finley, with his second.
“Trying to figure out how and when to use that depth was a thing for us,” Corrigan said of his potent three sets of midfielders. “But certainly the last six games of the year, that was a big factor for us. And from that moment, two things about that:
“One is you see the difference it makes on the field and the course of the game on the other team, but the difference it makes in your locker room, too. There's that many more guys for everybody to cheer for.
“I don't know if you saw our guys go crazy when Fisher Finley scored today. There's nothing greater than that than seeing guys celebrating each other and cheering for each other like that, and that dynamic is huge. It was all year for our team. So, that was another kind of bonus of that depth.”
Notre Dame head football coach Marcus Freeman was among the 31,479 onlookers who saw Maryland strike first, just 34 seconds into the game, on a goal by Ryan Siracusa. It was 2-0 Terps at the 11:35 mark when Daniel Kelly scored the first of his two goals.
Will Angrick got Notre Dame’s first score 63 seconds later. And it was 3-3 when the Irish went on an 11-1 run, started by Jalen Seymour with 4:54 left in the first quarter. Chris Kavanaugh scored three consecutive goals in the second period during the surge to put the Irish up 9-3.
He had two more in a row in the third quarter for a 13-4 Notre Dame lead, which gave him a team-leading 44 goals in the season.
That left the ESPN announcing crew, with no on-field drama to dissect, pondering which Irish Tewaaraton Award Finalist — Pat Kavanagh or Entenmann — was more likely to win the award among the five men’s players invited to Thursday’s award ceremony in Washington, D.C.
Both of them joined Chris Kavanagh on the NCAA All-Tournament Team, along with teammates Shawn Lyght, Devon McLane and Ben Ramsey. Connor Shellenberger of semifinalist Virginia as well as Maryland's Kelly, face-off man Luke Wierman and standout defender Ajax Zappitello were the non-Notre Dame players on the all-tourney team.
The Irish finished No. 1 nationally in scoring offense, and leapfrogged Towson on the season's final day to finish No. 1 in scoring defense as well.
“It's a lot more about those guys in that locker room than it is about me,” Corrigan said when the word “dynasty” came up in a question during the postgame press conference, “because they're the guys who have done this in the last two years.
“Again, I'll go back to not just the outstanding play of these guys — because clearly you see how good they are — but their leadership has been phenomenal. One of the COVID effects that all of us have had the last few years is really large rosters. And when you've got 60 guys on a roster and a game like this, the NCAA only allows you to play 32.
“You've got just as many guys who go into that game knowing they're not going to play a second as you have guys who are going to play. And that dynamic, it's not something the coach creates. It's something THEY create. It's something that they are accountable for and to.”
Corrigan came to Notre Dame when the idea of westward expansion of the East Coast-dominated college game was more conceptual than reality. His father, Gene, had been athletic director at Notre Dame from 1981-87 and made two of the greatest hires in modern Notre Dame athletics history in Lou Holtz for football and Muffet McGraw for women’s basketball.
Gene Corrigan’s successor at ND, Dick Rosenthal, in the fall of 1988 plucked Kevin Corrigan away from his alma mater, where he was an assistant. His first Irish team in the spring of 1989 went a modest 7-6.
In year 35 at ND, Kevin Corrigan won his first national title. On Monday he recorded Irish win No. 351 — then predictably deflected the attention away from himself and the “good luck” hat he refuses to part with, even though it looks like it’s been trampled in a stampede.
“When you have great kids and great leaders, you just kind of take your hands off the wheel on a lot of things; let those guys handle it,” he said. “They know how to handle it. When they don't, they'll come ask.
“So we're really, really fortunate to have those kinds of guys. And I think that's why we've made this run that we've made the last two and a half years.”
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