This story was originally published in US Lacrosse Magazine following the 2016 NCAA championship game. Because ESPNU is airing championship games from previous years this Memorial Day Weekend to fill the void left by COVID-19, we are resharing this article as it originally appeared.
The ghosts of North Carolina teams of the past quarter century — the talk of not winning the big game and why — were nowhere to be found at 4:35 p.m. on Memorial Day in the visiting locker room at Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia. Joe Breschi’s last dab, the Cam Newton-inspired dance that made the Tar Heels’ coach Internet famous a week earlier after the program broke a 23-year final four drought, brushed those bad vibes out for another generation.
“Dad’s like the dab guy now,” Breschi’s wife, Judy, said, standing nearby with three of the couple’s four daughters. They had just celebrated on the field of the NFL’s Eagles. “I cried … and I cried again,” 10-year-old Lucy said to no one in particular.
Most of the 46 members of the 2016 edition of the Tar Heels gathered in the center of the long room, doing a dance of their own, gyrating in unison to house music. Equipment, sweaty Carolina blue jerseys and other garments were scattered about, soaked after North Carolina’s epic 14-13 overtime win against top-seeded Maryland in an instant classic title game.
“We just won the national championship!” Breschi said, as if he couldn’t believe it.
At his locker, sophomore attackman Luke Goldstock, whose unsportsmanlike conduct penalty with 3.9 seconds left in the fourth quarter nearly cost North Carolina the game, felt equal parts shock: “It’s unbelievable.”
To his right, sophomore goalie Brian Balkam had already placed the events in perspective. He absorbed an extra-man opportunity shot from Terps midfielder Connor Kelly on the first possession of overtime to his, er, midsection. “We’ll call it that,” Balkam said, “I think everyone knows where, though.” Then a relatively unknown, soft-spoken left-handed sophomore from Canada, Chris Cloutier, sniped in a man-up OT winner from 13 yards for his NCAA tournament-record 19th goal. It happened just 32 seconds after Maryland goalie Kyle Bernlohr denied Cloutier after a series of stick fakes on the doorstep, with a gravity-defying stop that looked as if Bernlohr netted a striped bass from over his right shoulder. Neither side led by more than two goals after the first quarter. UNC battled back from a 13-11 deficit with 7:49 left.
“That will go down as one of the best games ever,” Balkam said to Goldstock.
Sure will.
In many respects, the end of the season befitted a topsy-turvy college lacrosse season defined by upsets and parity. North Carolina was unseeded in the NCAA tournament for only the second time in eight straight postseason appearances since Breschi returned to lead his alma mater ahead of the 2009 season, and started to attract a steady stream of highly regarded recruiting classes.
Until they put together four consecutive wins to claim the program’s first NCAA title since 1991, and make their first final four since 1993, the Tar Heels had not won more than two games in a row all season. They didn’t have perennial All-Americans like Jimmy Bitter, Joey Sankey, Chad Tutton or Marcus Holman anymore. They became the first unseeded national champion; the first to win a title with six losses.
“There was no talk about North Carolina getting to the final four until, really, we were in the quarterfinals,” Breschi said. “Most years, we’ve been top-five and everyone is talking about, ‘This is the year.’ That mounts on a kid. Whether they try to avoid it, or not think about it, or feel it, it’s there. This year, it wasn’t. Somebody told me the probability of us winning the national championship when the bracket came out was 3 percent. You talk about no pressure.”
But determination? Yes. Moments large and small led the Tar Heels to play championship-caliber team-ball in front of 26,749 spectators on the season’s final day.
It started informally last August in the basement of an off-campus house on Longview Street in Chapel Hill, N.C., where many North Carolina men’s and women’s lacrosse players live during their time at school. Four months removed from what senior midfielder Patrick Kelly described as an “incredibly embarrassing” 14-7 loss to Maryland in the 2015 quarterfinals that looked over almost as soon as it started, the returning seniors, juniors and sophomores aired grievances before a welcome-back night out.
Are you all in?
“If not, we don’t need people on this team,” Kelly said. “We’re already not as close to as talented as we were last year. What’s another player or two?”
It continued in another basement seven months later — at a historic hotel in Massachusetts after a 14-9 loss at UMass dropped the Tar Heels’ record to 3-3. Breschi asked the seniors and captains Kelly, short-stick defensive midfielder Jake Matthai, and junior defensemen Austin Pifani and Mark Rizzo to stay behind on the bus back after the game.
“What’s going on guys?” Breschi asked.
Redshirt freshman midfielder Mike D’Alessandro, who wasn’t even playing, delivered the most powerful statements during the 90-minute, cathartic in-person group chat that followed. D’Alessandro, who had planned to play football at North Carolina too, has undergone four knee surgeries in the last three years, on his left and right ACLs and a meniscus.
“Watching you guys play soft is terrible,” D’Alessandro said, tears streaming down his face. “I’d die to be on that field. I don’t know if I’ll ever play again. I don’t see anybody diving to check people, diving for ground balls, bodying people up. It’s making me sick, you guys taking it for granted.”
Pifani poured his heart out about what the Carolina jersey meant. Offensive coordinator David Metzbower silently steamed, battling the flu. “We didn’t have any prima donnas anymore after that,” he said.
That meeting set the tone for the Tar Heels’ turnaround, but still much on-field work remained for a team that was probably more talented than most realized, with 20 former high school All-Americans and preseason top-10 status.
Metzbower, who previously won six NCAA titles as an assistant at Princeton, continued to bring along converted midfielders Cloutier, who couldn’t beat a short stick, and Steve Pontrello on attack — they were the Bitter and Sankey replacements, even though Kelly admitted feeling angry after filling Bitter’s lefty role all fall, only to be told he’d play midfield in the spring. His quickness was more valuable there. Former scout teamer Brian Cannon later joined the second midfield at Breschi’s request. He scored three goals in the final four.
Assistant coach Brian Holman worked with Balkam, the hopeful permanent goalie replacement for Kieran Burke, who elected to leave the team in the offseason. Balkam was pulled from what became a key 17-16 win over Duke on April 1, and almost yanked from others.
Pifani, the team’s top cover defenseman, and Matthai, the leaders of the defense, clashed at times in recent seasons. The pair of opinionated personalities, one direct and loud and the other usually using a soft touch, now were on the same page. Good thing, because starting defenseman Zach Powers broke his arm against the Blue Devils and didn’t return until the postseason.
Even after the watershed post-UMass meeting, when intensity in practice and games picked up and playing time was laid out for all, the Tar Heels didn’t exactly set the lacrosse world on fire. They went 5-3 in the next eight games. And although that included a magical comeback from down five goals in the fourth quarter to beat then-No. 1 Notre Dame to give the Tar Heels’ NCAA tournament hope, the co-ACC regular-season champs also ended April with a 10-7 loss to Syracuse in the ACC semis. Afterward, faceoff man Stephen Kelly barked a reminder of what was at stake: “We need to make history!”
When North Carolina learned it made the tournament field May 1, the Tar Heels went dry. No drinking during playoffs, the captains decreed.
“I came here not to party, not to do drugs, none of that stuff,” said freshman midfielder Timmy Kelly, Patrick’s brother. “We came here to win championships. If you didn’t have it in mind, see you later.”
Looking at the 18-team bracket, Breschi noted that if North Carolina won its first-round game, which it did 10-9 at Marquette, for the quarterfinals he would return to Columbus, Ohio, where he worked as Ohio State head coach for 11 years and started a family.
“Lacrosse is supposed to be fun,” Breschi is one to say, and generally he gives off a bubbly, positive vibe. His daughters taught him to dab and the nay nay, too. He spent a lot of the morning of the championship game bear-hugging players on the fifth floor of their Philadelphia hotel as they headed to breakfast, yelling, “Let’s go!”
But upon arrival in Ohio on May 21, things were different. “I was fine the whole week, but once we got there, it all starts coming back to you,” Breschi said.
Breschi had been back several times, to remember his first-born, Michael, killed at age 3 in a tragic accident. Twelve years ago, in a preschool parking lot, Judy Breschi was buckling one of his siblings into the family minivan when a sport-utility vehicle backed up and struck Michael.
He is buried 15 miles north of Ohio State’s iconic Horseshoe, where the Tar Heels and Notre Dame would play the next day. Breschi arranged for Buckeyes coach Nick Myers, his friend and former assistant, to drive him there. Holman joined. They stayed for 30 minutes.
“Thank you for bringing me home and letting me go see my son,” an emotional Breschi told the team that Saturday night.
The next morning at breakfast, Patrick Kelly dedicated to their coach’s son what came next: a 13-9 win over the Fighting Irish that advanced North Carolina to the final four. Breschi broke down in a post-game TV interview. Congratulatory text messages flooded his phone. “Sorry for taking so long,” he replied.
Looking back, it feels like a foregone conclusion North Carolina would win two more games after sending the quarterfinal elephant in the room packing.
After beating Loyola 18-13 in the semifinals, the championship ended in storybook fashion. Starting OT man down, North Carolina players raised their thumbs up. That’s the gesture Michael Breschi made when his dad used to put him to bed. Powers’ swan dive to defend the ensuing shot that Balkam stopped was “a picture of our season,” D’Alessandro said. And Cloutier’s waist-level lefty rip, off a Mike Tagliaferri skip pass, set off the celebration that marked the final frame. In the most unexpected year, and as Breschi said aloud for days after, North Carolina won the national championship.