Duke's Season Was Dead. Then the Blue Devils Refused to Let Go.

Lacrosse teams playing on Memorial Day weekend almost always believed they could last deep into May. Duke is no different.

Few that have made it this far have stared down the precarity of their season effectively being over a month before playing in the NCAA tournament semifinals.

The resurrection of the unseeded Blue Devils’ season is unlike any other in coach John Danowski’s 20-year run in Durham. There aren’t many precedents for a team effectively left for dead the way Duke was after its 7-6 setback against Notre Dame on April 18 extended its losing streak to four.

The trudge back to the Koskinen Stadium locker room was only the start of the day’s agony. The defeat meant Duke — which at the time owned no high-profile victories and had an RPI mired in the teens — needed Virginia to beat North Carolina that afternoon simply to have a chance to make the ACC tournament.

Things were not promising. North Carolina was up four after scoring with 6:45 to go. But the Cavaliers kept coming, tying it with a second left in regulation.

Then the Tar Heels scored in overtime, and an already miserable scene added an extra dose of gloom.

“It was like a double knife to the throat,” defenseman Charlie Johnson said. “We thought we were done. We were like, ‘It’s over. We. Are. Done.’ … It was a brutal scene. Put a fork in us, we’re done. We were acting as if the season was [over].”

Short-stick defensive midfielder Aidan Maguire said there were parallels to the funeral mood that settled in after the Blue Devils’ NCAA tournament losses the last three years. Seniors walked around giving hugs, and plenty of emotion flowed as Duke’s apparent fate settled in a week before its regular-season finale.

Only the day’s lacrosse activities weren’t done. The Blue Devils don’t host a traditional Senior Day, the thinking being that their season will go on well beyond the regular season. (And they’re usually right; Duke has played an NCAA tournament home game 15 times in Danowski’s tenure.)

Instead, there is a banquet, and this year’s came that evening. The Blue Devils didn’t really know what to think after the wrenching loss, but they walked in all the same as they saw the pictures and videos compiled about their time on campus.

“It really hits you and it makes you take a step back and really have perspective on where we are at this time and how blessed we truly are,” midfielder Max Sloat said. “Once we lost to Notre Dame, we thought about, ‘Hey, our season’s over, but we’re so blessed to be here with each other and meet these special people and have these special people in our lives for the rest our lives, so we would be remiss if we wasted this final week we have with each other.’”

By the time the next practice week began, the agony of the loss abated some. And Danowski — in a move that was both motivationally shrewd and ultimately prescient — insisted upon review Duke still had a chance.

Yes, the frustration was plentiful. For losing an eighth in a row to Notre Dame. For dropping a fourth in a row overall. From coming a goal shy of winning their home finale.

But there was still one more chance to play, and it was doozy: a trip just down U.S. Route 15-501 to North Carolina, which was firmly ensconced in the top five nationally and on its way to earning a No. 3 seed in the NCAA tournament.

“We thought if we beat North Carolina that we would be in a conversation with the committee,” Danowski said. “In the moment, right after the Notre Dame game, yeah, we were all disappointed. But Monday when we started looking at it with less emotion, more analytically, we thought a win — and we didn’t say a decisive win or anything like that — but we thought a win would put us in a conversation.”

And win, the Blue Devils did. They jumped North Carolina early, building an eight-goal lead by halftime. Maybe the second half had some dodgy moments, but Duke still came away with a 16-12 victory.

The Blue Devils had a high-profile victory to their credit. Their RPI spiked from 15th to eighth. If things didn’t fall their way, at least they had crafted an admirable exit. As Johnson walked off the field in Chapel Hill, he turned to his roommate Maguire and said that if it was their last moment together at Duke, he was proud.

But Duke also had found some mojo from the experience.

“We played without fear. We played freely. We played together,” Maguire said. “Guys played confidently. They played fast, but not in a hurry. That was our best showing in that regard. Both sides of the ball, we played together. The offense in particular, they were just fun to watch. And we felt good coming out of that and we didn’t know what the future held. We were already out of the ACC tournament. That was a crappy reality, but we knew we were practicing that week.”

Danowski, in particular, might as well have been in heaven. There was a week to work on fundamentals without fretting about preparing for an opponent, and he took full advantage. With more than four decades as a head coach to his credit, Danowski always vouches for the basics over flashiness, the simple play over something that will attract eyeballs on “SportsCenter.”

Passing. Catching. Running through ground balls. All the stuff the Blue Devils had done for nine months, they doubled down on that week.

“It was kind of like going back to that Duke lacrosse camp,” junior attackman Benn Johnston said.

Looming over it was a bunch of results the Blue Devils couldn’t control. Already, they’d received some help the weekend before when Ohio State lost to Michigan in the Big Ten tournament, effectively finishing off another at-large contender.

But things could have gone sideways. What if Michigan made one of its patented late-season runs and won the Big Ten? Or Richmond got bumped into the at-large field with an Atlantic 10 tournament loss? Would Yale or Harvard winning the Ivy League tournament change things?

“It was like someone was scooping my guts every night,” Johnson said. “Tuesday night, we watched the Patriot League quarterfinals. Then Thursday night, we’re watching whatever. Friday, Saturday, Sunday. It was five days in a row of just dodging bullets. It was brutal. My parents are obsessed with this, and my mom’s texting, ‘Oh, so-and-so just scored. That’s good for us.’ It was brutal, but then we felt pretty good once things happened. Sunday, we felt good.”

Duke got almost the exact results it needed across the board. There were no bid thieves. The Big Ten and Ivy League semifinals unfolded in chalky fashion. The Blue Devils finished at No. 10 in the RPI, a ranking that usually corresponds with tournament inclusion. But there’s no such thing as too much help with something like this.

They practiced that morning, which meant Maguire and several teammates who regularly attend Mass chose to go to the 8 p.m. service at the Duke University Chapel instead.

“We had quite the big crew there,” Maguire said. “It was really cool. It was nice to see the guys I go with every week and also some new faces. And you know everyone was praying for the same thing in there.”

After communion, they left to go to Danowski’s house to watch the selection show at 9:30. Maguire, who played in the national title game three years ago, felt tight. With clenched fists, he paced around, hoping to end the week-plus wait with good news.

By the time half the bracket was revealed, Duke knew it was on its way to fourth-seeded Richmond.

“When we saw our name on there, that’s all we needed to see,” Maguire said. “We turned it off and just spoke with the team. I think the feeling was relief and just joy to have more time together with one another.”

Things grew increasingly anticlimactic the last two weeks. Duke shrugged off a deficit in the final 10 minutes at Richmond, earning a 14-12 victory to spoil the Spiders’ first-ever NCAA tournament home game. Then the Blue Devils (11-4) pulverized Georgetown 16-6 on Sunday, their most lopsided quarterfinal victory since 2012, to set up Saturday’s semifinal with top-seeded Princeton (15-2) in Charlottesville, Va.

Danowski doesn’t see a massive difference in how Duke is playing, with one simple-yet-vital exception. The Blue Devils are shooting better, simply making plays that have been available most of the year. In five games starting with a taut March 22 defeat of Denver, the Blue Devils shot 19.1 percent. In their last three outings, they’re at 36.8 percent.

In practice, it means Duke has a lot of dangerous options playing well at the same time. Kyle Colsey (four goals, three assists) and Liam Kershis (three goals, four assists) share the team lead in points in the postseason, but six players have had multi-goal games the last two weeks. Sloat, shut out at Richmond, responded with four goals and an assist against Georgetown.

But there are contributions coming from other, less predictable places. Freshman Anthony Drago scored his first career goal against Richmond. Grad student Thomas Mencke had his first multi-goal game since Feb. 21 against Georgetown.

“Even when the games are close, everyone’s looking at each other like, ‘We’re good, we’re fine, we’re going to get through this,’” Johnston said. “I remember there was a time in Richmond when we were down two in the fourth quarter and Aidan just looked at us and went, ‘We’re good, dude. You guys are going to score.’ And then we scored, what, three in a row and we won the game.”

However this weekend goes, it will go down as an unorthodox Duke lacrosse season. It’s the Blue Devils’ 13th semifinal appearance under Danowski, but their first as an unseeded team. It’s almost a cliché that Duke takes a puzzling early-season loss. But this team was 8-0 (albeit against a manageable schedule) before its four-game slide against eventual postseason teams.

And it came with a senior class that had already experienced the regression of playing on the season’s final day as freshmen to squandering a fourth-quarter lead in the quarterfinals against Maryland in 2024 and then bowing out at home in the first round last year.

“It is different because it was a different climb,” Danowski said. “But if you ask anyone in life what their greatest victories were, they’ll tell you when they got knocked down and got back up. When they failed and sometimes you fail miserably, but you hang in there. This is a tremendous gift for these young men in terms of a life lesson that you don’t give up. You keep showing up. You stay on task. You trust yourself. You trust your teammates. You trust the coaches. You trust the system.”

And, of course, you believe like the Blue Devils did after staring down the possibility their postseason hopes were kaput in mid-April.

“The coolest part about it was seeing this team unite after four losses and come together and say, ‘We’re not done and we don’t want to be done,’” Maguire said. “We were at a point where people could have given up and that was a possibility. But they don’t do that at Duke. Coach D doesn’t recruit people who quit and you saw that. I was just lucky to see my teammates and see their belief in this.”