BC Back In Title Game After Battling 'Cuse

The first five minutes of Friday night's NCAA national semifinal felt like a fever dream to Shea Dolce. The Boston College freshman represented the biggest masthead to the Eagles' march to their sixth consecutive Final Four, but the spicy Syracuse side threatened her stability with two quick goals in the first 90 seconds of the first period. Less than three minutes elapsed after Olivia Adamson and Emma Ward spiked a two-goal lead for the Orange, but Ward's second goal of the afternoon sent a chill through the collective spine of BC's players and supporters.

Dolce took the goals especially hard, but the defense in front of her recognized the gravity of the moment and steadied its netminder for a sensational night. The unit bore down, and for the rest of the night, BC stopped the high-powered Orange offense from running roughshod through its territory. The three-goal outburst was no more, and two hours later, the 3-0 deficit was flipped on its head when the team emerged victorious from an 8-7 grind of a lacrosse game to advance to its sixth consecutive national championship game appearance.

"As cliche as it is, defense wins championships," said head coach Acacia Walker-Weinstein, "and our defensive performance [on Friday] was out of this world. In terms of the stats, it doesn't always reflect what happens at the end of the game because there is a component that our girls have that's not measured on the statsheet, and it's composure and belief in themselves. That's why they are always really dialed into the fourth quarter. They are never out of [a game]. The moment is never too big, ever. It's something this team has been very good at all year. The moment's never been too big."

The game itself was physical and spirited while wavering into mean and nasty, but the conversation between Dolce and her defense stood alone among a litany of moments that breathed life back into BC's quest for its second overall national championship. The Orange completely outplayed the Eagles in the early goings, and those three goals were a part of a first period in which Syracuse outshot BC by a 12-4 margin. Six of the shots went on goal, but Dolce stopped the other three finding their way through her team's defense.

She finished with seven overall stops, including two during a high-powered third quarter where the two teams combined for 12 overall shots. Eight came from the Orange, including consecutive goals to start the second half that posted Syracuse to a 6-4 lead, but the interim time periods between a goal in the first five minutes and bulk of the quarter produced little to no offense for either side. Nobody scored for over six minutes, and Jenn Medjid's goal with 3:29 remaining was the only strike from a bewildered and quieted BC attack.

It broke up the three-goal quarter for the Orange, but it overlapped with a signal change in how the teams played the game. Syracuse previously suffered through a 20-minute stretch of the first half without any offense, but the team maintained its lead through self-imposed mistakes by the BC attack. The Eagles committed nine turnovers in the first half and 11 in the third and fourth quarters, and neither draw controls nor free positions - usually gimme offensive movements in the BC system - produced any kind of consistency against a well-prepared, well-scouted Syracuse midfield.

There was a decided choppiness, but BC's engine stayed on its rickety tracks because of Medjid's goals. Her third quarter strike brought the team back within one before Megan Carney re-established a two-goal lead, and her two goals within 20 seconds of the fourth quarter included a draw control breakout that saw Kayla Martello feed her for a buried shot that tied the game at 7-7 with her 82nd goal of the season.

"I thought I needed to step up as a player and a leader for my team when we needed it," Medjid said, "so I think that's just what happened…our offense didn't have our best day, but we came together in the end.

"I just knew once we were going to tie, we were going to win the whole thing," she added. "We were going to make the stops we needed to make, and we were going to score the game-winning goal. I knew that we were going to win it."

That confidence brimmed in BC through the final minutes, and Martello's goal with 3:31 remaining handed the Eagles their only - and the most important - lead of the game. Having already stymied the Syracuse offense, the defense dug into its heels for the final minutes, to which a frenzied Orange attack tried one last shot that was blocked by Belle Smith before it made its way to Dolce.

"Jenn Kent, our defensive coordinator, is a mastermind about [the system]," Walker-Weinstein said. "She's been saying all year long to 'finish your 1-v-1's,' meaning it doesn't matter if you get beat. You're still in it, and it was exactly what happened. She says it every day. She is relentless about it. She's incredibly smart, but in a moment like [Smith's] where she got beat fair and square on a 1-v-1, to stay in it and go for the back check, it's a remarkable display of focus. Moments aren't too big. She didn't give up or get down on herself. She just did what her coaches told her to do, and that's what makes her a great player."

That performance, among others, called back to the initial conversation Dolce had with her defense. The three-goal deficit, in that moment, felt like a mountainous hurdle against a Syracuse team that went undefeated through much of the regular season by blowing the windows off the defenses of Maryland, North Carolina, BC and Northwestern, but after buckling down, the 25-goal output from the Johns Hopkins game and the 13-7 win over James Madison never materialized.

Meaghan Tyrrell, a 100-point scorer with 50-plus goals and 50-plus assists, never even registered a point, and Emma Ward's near-100 point season ended with nothing beyond those two first period goals. Emma Tyrrell scored once, but it required a woman-up situation. The rest of the eye-popping numbers from the regular season never materialized, even as the situations that would have produced them did.

"[The conversation] was kind of a pick-me-up," Dolce said. "My defenders, they have my back, and they were talking to me the whole game. They can tell when I'm upset. So they're always there with me throughout the whole first start of the game. They scored an amazing goal right off the bat, so I felt like it was going to be a high-scoring game. It ended up being lower-scoring than I expected, but I knew [we'd have] to get going from that first whistle."

With the win, BC becomes the third consecutive team to advance to at least six national championship game appearances. They succeed Maryland, which advanced to eight out of 10 national championship games between 2010-2019 with five consecutive appearances between 2013-2017 and five championships, including the 2016 and 2019 titles over BC, though the Terrapins took the mantle from Northwestern, which won five straight national championships between 2005-2009 as part of a seven-title run over eight straight title game appearances.

Walker-Weinstein was part of three of those Wildcat teams as an assistant coach and a former player for the Terps, but this marks BC's first matchup in the national tournament against Northwestern since the second-seeded Wildcats eliminated unseeded BC, 11-8, in the first round of the 2011 tournament - the Eagles' first-ever national tournament appearance.

"We have to find a way to be better in one day," Walker-Weinstein said. "We can't be the same [as we were against Syracuse]. We have to improve in some way, whether it's mentally, physically. I trust the preparation. I trust that these guys will do everything they need to be ready to go for Sunday, and the preparation starts now.

"The goal is to win a national championship," she said, "and we have a lot of work to do in about a day-and-a-half. I know the girls. I know they will do what it takes, and we'll be ready to go."

The 2023 NCAA Division I Women's Lacrosse Championship between Boston College and Northwestern is scheduled for Sunday, May 28, at 12 p.m. from WakeMed Soccer Park in Cary, North Carolina. The game can be seen on national television via ESPN with online streaming available through the network's platform of web-based and mobile device apps.

BC Back In Title Game After Battling 'Cuse

Players Mentioned

Shea Dolce

Kayla Martello

Jenn Medjid

Belle Smith

Related Videos