Virginia Rallies Past Maryland, Advances To Championship Weekend
Posted on Saturday, May. 18, 2019, 8:58 pm
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By Jerry Ratcliffe
It has been the year of the comeback for Virginia’s sports teams, and Saturday’s NCAA men’s lacrosse quarterfinals continued to carry the theme as the Cavaliers rallied from five goals behind to stave off Maryland, 13-12, in overtime, and advance to next weekend’s semifinals.
Third-seeded UVA, now 15-3 on the season, will take on No. 2-seeded Duke, which outlasted No. 7 Notre Dame, 14-13, in overtime. Game times for Championship Weekend will be announced Sunday.
The Cavaliers, advancing to the semifinals for the first time since 2011 (when UVA eventually defeated Maryland for the title), trailed the Terps 12-7 with 10:38 remaining in regulation. The situation appeared dim for the Wahoos, who had been outscored 6-2 in the second half up to that point.
In fact, Maryland had all the momentum, having scored five unanswered goals. However, the Terps all of a sudden grew conservative, stopped attacking in attempting to protect a lead and milk the clock.
The Terps must have forgotten Virginia’s reputation for comebacks. Over the course of the season, the Wahoos had rallied from four (or more) goal deficits and came back to win (Syracuse in OT, Brown in OT, Notre Dame, and UNC).
Instead of folding, the Cavaliers became more aggressive, reeling off five straight unanswered goals to send the game into overtime. UVA faceoff specialist Petey LaSalla claimed his seventh faceoff in a row before teammate Michael Kraus spotted sophomore Matt Moore, who fired to the upper corner from 10 yards out 45 seconds into the “sudden death” overtime, putting the Wahoos into the semis.
Moore became the first player in UVA history to score 40 goals and have 40 assists in a single season.
It was the fourth overtime game for the Cavaliers this season and the fourth win in those circumstances.
The win wasn’t without controversy as UVA’s game-tying goal with 1:14 remaining in regulation left Maryland stunned in disbelief. Television replays showed that Kraus’ shot caromed off the crossbar all the way back to midfield. Officials deemed the ball had scored, deadlocking the game at 12-all, and eventually sending the game into the extra period.
“It happened so fast,” Terps’ coach John Tillman told reporters after the game, ending his team’s five-season stretch of making it to Championship Weekend. “You see the ball released and then it just happens. All of a sudden the ball pops out. I didn’t have a good vantage point, so you’re just kind of trusting [the call].”
Tillman said he asked the officials if they were certain the ball scored and they confirmed their call. Instant replay is not used in college lacrosse.
“I’m not sure I could ask much more than that,” Tillman said.
“It’s kind of out of our control,” the Terps’ Bubba Fairman said after the game. “It’s tough to look at it when you’re on the sideline and wonder whether or not that it went in. But at the end of the day, I think the attitude on the sideline was like, ‘Let’s go get one back.’”
Time ran out on Maryland and with the momentum having swung to Virginia, coach Lars Tiffany had to feel good about extending the game to sudden death.
It didn’t take long for Moore to settle the issue, leading to a wild celebration on the UVA sideline. Tiffany had led the Cavaliers back to a place where the program had not been in quite some time. The result also left Maryland fans and lacrosse observers questioning Tillman’s strategy to go conservative in an attempt to protect the five-goal lead with plenty of time remaining.
“As a coach, those are always things you reflect back on,” the Maryland coach said. “Our kids did everything they needed to do. I need to do a better job in that moment, and managing some of the things of the game.”
The Terps stopped attacking and went into a conservative zone defense.
Maryland knew it would have its hands full in trying to slow down Virginia, one of the nation’s most powerful offenses. Only twice this season had the Cavaliers been held to less than 10 goals.
However, the Terps defense stepped up to take a 6-5 halftime lead, a half in which they led in ground balls, turnovers, and were tied in faceoffs. Four of UVA’s goals came in somewhat unsettled situations for Maryland’s defense.
After Virginia’s Dox Aiken knotted the game 7-7 on a shot from the top of the circle with 6:42 to play in the third quarter, Maryland got hot, scoring three consecutive times to end the period. The Terps tacked on two more goals in the first 4 1/2 minutes of the fourth quarter to build the 12-7 lead.
The Cavaliers took advantage of Maryland’s stall ball the rest of the way, eventually scoring six consecutive unanswered goals for the win.
“We’ve been doing it all year,” Tiffany said of his red-hot squad, which has won 14 of its last 15 games.
“We knew Virginia would make a run,” Tillman said. “You hope that, alright, we can get it back, we can get some stops. Even with that, get a possession off the faceoff, groundball, whatever it may be. A lot of those things just didn’t happen.”
One of the reasons it didn’t happen was UVA’s LaSalla, one of the unsung heroes of the Cavaliers’ run.
He won his seventh faceoff in a row to begin the overtime, his seventh faceoff win out of eight, during a span that covered the fourth quarter and overtime.
One of UVA’s many standouts during the comeback win was Ryan Conrad, who scored three of his four goals in the fourth quarter.
“He’s Captain America,” Tiffany said of Conrad after the game.
Conrad’s back-to-back scores kickstarted the rally, followed 20 seconds later by a score from Ian Laviano on an assist from Kraus, cutting Maryland’s lead to 12-10. Conrad struck again with 2:41 to play, then Kraus tied the game with the controversial shot with 1:14 to play.
“I am a very grateful man to be surrounded by great men,” Tiffany said in the postgame. “When I think about the Virginia lacrosse team, I think of men that are driven to succeed. It has happened all season where we have been down. You can lean back on that.
“We were down five against Notre Dame, it wasn’t with half a quarter left, but we have been down before. These men truly draw upon each other and lean upon each other. It all starts with trust. It was a heroic effort from our first year, Petey LaSalla. For him to do what he did in the second half against a team that is notoriously very good at the faceoff. He kept giving us those possessions in order to make the comeback happen.”
Other than Conrad’s four goals and one assist, Laviano added three goals, Kraus one goal and four assists, and Moore finished with one goal and two assists. Kraus extended his active streak with at least one point to 47 games.
Maryland entered the day 7-0 in the quarterfinals under Tillman.
Virginia advanced to the Championship Weekend for the 23rd time in program history. The semifinals and finals will be played in Philadelphia.
