Duke and Johns Hopkins Return for NCAA Lacrosse Championship
One year after the Duke lacrosse scandal, the team is playing for the title.
BALTIMORE, May 28, 2007 — -- Hard to believe it was just two years ago that Johns Hopkins beat Duke for the national title.
That was before Duke had its season shut down while Johns Hopkins had some lose faith in its program last year. That was before the Blue Devils started over, in a way, with a new coach and a new attitude. That was before the Blue Jays, in a way, learned losing can sometimes lead to winning.
And that was before both the Blue Devils and Blue Jays learned to lean on each other to succeed.
Now, Duke and Johns Hopkins meet once again for the NCAA lacrosse national championship on Monday (ESPN, 1 p.m. EDT). The past is not forgotten. It can't and won't be anytime soon. But both teams have somehow become better because of it.
"You like to say [the past] doesn't matter, but it does. But it's not the off-the-field stuff that made this possible. It's the fact we stayed together like a team," said Duke junior Zack Greer, who scored four goals in Duke's 12-11 semifinal win over Cornell. "It's the 6 a.m. fall workouts. It's going out on the field with a new coach, new offensive schemes, a new defense. All the players went through it and we bonded.
"We're 41 brothers on the field."
Still, it was a family under fire for well over a year. There were constant stories, speculation and suspicion. Despite the Blue Devils' success on the field -- they went 17-2 fueled by a pair of the country's best players in Greer and Matt Danowski and play an aggressive style that managed to turn casual fans here into Blue Devils backers -- they are better known for what happened off the field.
But coach John Danowski says the success on the field coincides with what happened off the field.
"Can't do one without the other," he said. "The [past] is always there on a daily basis. Maybe it's in the paper one day or on TV the other, but it's always something. And we dealt with it and it's not an excuse one way or the other. We made slogans like 'Adjust, Adapt, Overcome' and 'Don't sweat the little stuff.' You try to deal with it as best you can.
