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Duke’s Comeback Season Ends Short of the Title


The Duke head coach, John Danowski, shakes hands with Johns Hopkins' players after the team's loss in
the NCAA Division I Championship lacrosse game.

By PETE THAMEL
Published: May 29, 2007

BALTIMORE, May 28 — His eyes red from crying and the eye black on his cheeks smudged from sweat and tears, the Duke senior Matt Danowski did his best to maintain his composure.

He had just trudged off the field after the Blue Devils’ 12-11 loss to Johns Hopkins in the N.C.A.A. men’s lacrosse title game Monday, and Danowski’s emotions were a mixture of sorrow and pride.

“Right now there’s a sense of emptiness,” he said. “No one wants to walk away with a second-place trophy. But I’m extremely proud of these guys and the way we handled ourselves since last spring.”

Danowski’s mixed emotions underscored the prevailing feeling in the Duke locker room after the team endured 14 tumultuous months.

In front of a record crowd of 48,443 at M&T Bank Stadium, Duke overcame a six-goal halftime deficit but could not convert two shots to tie the score in the final seven seconds.

“Unfortunately, we didn’t give them the ending that people were looking for or hoping for,” said Duke Coach John Danowski, Matt’s father.

Johns Hopkins got a goal from Kevin Huntley with 3 minutes 25 seconds remaining and held on for the program’s ninth N.C.A.A. tournament title.

The Blue Jays also survived Duke’s final flurry and overcame the emotion that was attached to this Blue Devils team. Duke became the focus of the sporting world and the national news media after three players were accused of rape by a stripper hired to dance at a team party last spring.

Duke’s president, Richard H. Brodhead, canceled the team’s season and accepted the resignation of Coach Mike Pressler hours after Durham County authorities disclosed an e-mail message written by a team member saying he planned to invite strippers to his dorm room, kill them and cut off their skin.

Last month, the three players charged — David Evans, Reade Seligmann and Collin Finnerty — were cleared of all charges and the North Carolina attorney general called the district attorney, Michael B. Nifong, a “rogue prosecutor” in a “tragic rush to accuse.”

The player who wrote the e-mail message, Ryan McFadyen, is still on the team.

As the case swung from protests against the team, caused in part by Nifong’s public statements, to the eventual proclamation of the players’ innocence, the team coalesced. John Danowski took over the Duke lacrosse team on July 21, 2006, and his first mission was to help the players “reshape a culture a little bit.”

The Duke players performed 570 hours of community service as part of a mandatory community-service program Danowski started.

“It was not an apology for last spring,” he has said. “It’s what I believe in.”

This academic year, the Blue Devils excelled on and off the field, accumulating grade point averages of 3.45 and 3.3 in the fall and spring semesters, and earning the No. 1 seed for the N.C.A.A. tournament.

“They were put in a situation that no group of young men have ever been put in, ever been thrust into,” said John Danowski, who took over after 21 seasons at Hofstra. “They will be the legacy, the standard-bearers that everyone will look up to for everything, in the classroom and on the field.”

He added: “These kids have done everything and more demanded of them. They’ve lived just about a perfect life. They just lost a lacrosse game today.”

The three Duke players who were wrongly accused are no longer on the team, but all were in attendance Monday.

So was Pressler, now the coach at Bryant College in Smithfield, R.I., who has written a book on his experience and gave an extended interview to ESPN on Monday morning. After the game, he stood in the corner of the Duke locker room wearing sunglasses and a black Bryant College hat.

He declined to comment, saying that it was a “private moment.”

“It just brought a whole other set of emotions,” Matt Danowski said of Pressler’s presence. “I wish we could have won for him, too, because he deserves it just as much as anyone in this locker room did.”

On a languid, muggy day, Duke looked sluggish for most of the game and was not competitive early on.

The Blue Devils trailed at halftime, 10-4, in part because they lost the first nine face-offs and struggled to maintain possession.

But in a third quarter as dominating as it was stunning, Duke outscored Johns Hopkins, 5-0.

“It was a great feeling to look around in the fourth quarter and look into everyone’s eyes on the team and knowing that we were going to fight to the bitter end,” the Duke senior Tony McDevitt said.

But for Duke, the end was simply bitter. The Blue Devils hit the post twice in the final five minutes, and Hopkins goalie Jesse Schwartzman made a save on a Brad Ross shot with seven seconds remaining that will be played in lacrosse highlights for years to come.

With Ross alone about 6 yards from the cage, he uncorked a shot that Schwartzman stopped with his right foot and admitted that he did not even see. Duke corralled the rebound, but Max Quinzani’s heave from more than 15 yards out skipped harmlessly past the cage. Schwartzman had 15 saves and was named the tournament’s most outstanding player.

That capped a week in which Hopkins played the underdog role, an unusual one for a program known as the sport’s version of Notre Dame.

Hopkins’s ninth N.C.A.A. tournament national title ties it with Syracuse for the most in the sport. But with the Duke drama, undefeated Cornell and underdog Delaware, the Blue Jays were largely ignored at the final four.

“When I woke up this morning and ESPN did a story on the national championship game and didn’t mention Johns Hopkins once, I took that personally,” the Hopkins senior Jake Byrne said.

John Danowski had spent much of the season playing down any link between the events of last spring and this season.

“It’s not vindication,” Danowski said, “because you’re not a good or bad person if you win or lose a game.”

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company