Helmets, elbow pads and sticks flew in the air like popcorn. Players sprinted onto the field screaming, eventually meeting just feet from the cage near the south end zone of Gillette Stadium — right below a scoreboard emblazoned with the Maryland logo and the word “Champions” accompanying it.
Players passed around the walnut and bronze trophy, starting with Tim Muller, the All-American defenseman and NCAA championship MVP. Each lifted it in the air with more venom than any weight he benched in the preparation leading up to the national championship game.
Eventually, the trophy found its way to coach John Tillman, still drenched from the Gatorade shower that washed away painful memories of near misses. He held it for a few moments, seemingly unsure of what to do with it and how to react to what they had just accomplished.
“He’s such a role model in my life and such a great person,” star attackman Matt Rambo said of his coach, just feet away. “He does everything for me. I love him so much.”
Tillman lifted the trophy briefly and handed it off to his players, then continued his celebration tour, hugging Isaiah Davis-Allen, the captain whose mother died in 2013 and helped Tillman cope with the death of his own mother, Elizabeth, just a few weeks earlier.
“This is for you,” Tillman said.
Then, he headed to the stands and met a crowd of thousands of Terps supporters. He high-fived fans, family and alumni while letting out a beaming smile of both joy and relief while the golden confetti and rain poured down — a celebration fit for a team that won its first national championship since 1975.
Among them was Brian Dougherty, the Hall of Fame goalie who in College Park is best known for his 1995 NCAA championship weekend MVP performance, when he made 23 saves each in a semifinal win over Johns Hopkins and then another heartbreaking loss to Syracuse in the final. He’s been to every final four Maryland has made since graduating in 1996.
“I felt 42 years of frustration just evaporate,” Dougherty said.
Forty-two years. The pressure of that figure no longer lingered. Nor did the sting of nine NCAA championship game losses in between 1975 and 2017, including runner-up finishes under Tillman in 2011, 2012, 2015 and 2016.
Maryland was ready for this moment. It was the Terps’ time.
“I hadn’t thought a ton about it until people were like, ‘Oh, this is your third straight one,’” Tillman said. “They were pretty comfortable, you know, just even throughout the year. They were pretty confident, and they just would never back down to challenges.
“I’m lucky to have the job I have. It’s a dream come true. I love coaching. I love working with young people. To me, it’s about teaching. My mom was a teacher. To be at a storied place like Maryland, I thank my lucky stars every day.”
Tillman never tried to shield his players from the mounting expectations in College Park. Instead, he embraced them as a symptom of a terrific tradition in which they each had a stake. When legendary Terps coach Bud Beardmore, the architect of the 1975 NCAA title team, died in January 2016 due to complications from Parkinson’s disease, the current Maryland team rallied around his favorite catch phrase.
Be the best.
“[Tillman] always says it’s for us,” junior midfielder Tim Rotanz said. “We’re doing it for him. We’re doing it for the alumni. We’re doing it for the guys from 1975. It’s more than just us. We’ve got Maryland on our chest and a whole state behind us.”
The Maryland victory was years in the making, and it wasn’t the first time fans and alumni traveled to the title game hopeful. They did so in Philadelphia last year, where the story of the 2017 Terps began.
Competing in its second straight NCAA final — the 2015 version was no contest, as Denver cruised to its first championship — Maryland ran into an unseeded North Carolina team that carried its own dose of destiny. The Terps coughed up a late lead, could not convert on a golden extra-man opportunity to start overtime and lost when Chris Cloutier scored on the other end.
Tillman knew his team was at a crossroads. With most of the roster returning — including star attackmen Matt Rambo and Colin Heacock on offense, Muller and Davis-Allen on defense — it could learn from the “scars” of the last two years.
Or the damage could linger.
“The past year has been rough,” Muller said. “We knew as seniors that we had to come together this year and bring it together for us to get this national championship.”
The pressure was only magnified when the Terps were ranked No. 2 to begin the season. Expectations existed, and the whispers of another potential title shot came with them.
Maryland, as a team, needed to block out the chatter. Rambo and Heacock kept the guys loose. Rambo, the Philadelphia product, and Heacock, from Baltimore, roomed together all four years in College Park and became great friends.
“We’re all pretty close off the field, so I think we carry that on to the field,” Heacock said. “We always trust in one another, and so we’re always there to have each other’s back.”
Rambo and Heacock’s energy and humor helped raise the spirits of the team as the season rolled along. The Terps also rallied around their love for music, specifically classic rock. The team brought a speaker onto the bus before games, and blared music from their phones at the behest of Tillman. For some reason, the players seemed fixated on one song: “Money for Nothing” by Dire Straits.
“You could give me a million guesses, I would never guess that song,” Tillman said. “They love when the drum starts going, and it has the guitar riffs. Every road trip, every time we come back, every time before the game, that song comes on and they will not get sick of it. They just keep playing it.”
Poised and loose, even in the biggest moments, Maryland navigated a daunting 10-day stretch in April that included a game against then-No. 1 Penn State at home, followed by road trips to then-No. 5 Albany and then-No. 11 Rutgers. The Terps won all three games, including a triple-OT thriller against the Scarlet Knights in Piscataway, N.J.
Then, there was the Big Ten tournament championship, where the Terps beat Penn State and Ohio State on the same weekend to take the crown.
It was a team, and offense, that was prepared for the NCAA tournament. That started with Rambo, who broke Bobby Boniello’s career points record in a win over Johns Hopkins on April 29 and became the first Maryland player to win the prestigious Tewaaraton Award.
When Rambo arrived in 2014, he was the consensus No. 1 recruit in the country. Talk about expectations. As a freshman, he scored 30 goals as a complementary finisher around seniors like midfielder Mike Chanenchuk.
The following fall, Rambo was involved with former teammate and student assistant coach Brian Cooper in an incident that initially produced first- and second-degree assault charges against each of them, while Rambo also was charged with destruction of property.
Rambo later received probation before judgment on a single count of second-degree assault and was acquitted of a charge of destruction of property. Rambo set about clearing his name by fulfilling community service obligations, while serving a suspension throughout the 2015 preseason.
“That was a difficult one,” Tillman said. “Matt was accused of something without all of the facts being known. We didn’t rush to judgment. Matt learned that if you play here, you are a celebrity and you’re under a microscope. With social media, the game might be over, but the TV is still on you.”
“Matt learned the hard way that, with everybody knowing who he is, he’s got to walk a tighter line,” said Rich Rambo, Matt’s father. “Student-athletes are scrutinized more than students. To me, it was blown out of proportion. He was embarrassed by it. He took it on the chin and held his head high. He’s a model Maryland student and a better man because of what happened.”
Rambo also became a better lacrosse player, culminating in a senior season in which he became the first 40-40 scorer in Terps history with 42 goals and 45 assists.
“I never thought this would happen,” he said at the Tewaaraton ceremony. “I just went there to be the best, like our motto, and try to win a national championship, so this is icing on top.”
Rambo, of course, did not do it alone. Alongside Heacock and Rambo, one-time Syracuse transfer Dylan Maltz cleaned up the scraps. The fun-loving attackmen called themselves “Run DMC.” Midfielder Connor Kelly emerged as one of the deadliest shooters in college lacrosse. Reserve faceoff specialist Jon Garino and Maryland’s fleet of athletic long poles became big factors down the stretch, especially as the Terps found ways to neutralize Albany’s TD Ierlan, Denver’s Trevor Baptiste and Ohio State’s Jake Withers, the top three draw men in the country. Rotanz, a converted attackman who as a sophomore had to overcome a rare and severe case of viral vertigo, scored 33 goals as a starting senior midfielder, including three in the championship game. Heck, even second-line middie Adam DeMillo scored twice in the final.
Now about that pressure. The 42-year drought was an obvious storyline after the game, but players and coaches, for the first time, could speak on it with a smile on their faces.
“I’m so happy [not to hear about 1975],” Rotanz said. “It’s 2017 now.”
No scene was more indicative of what this title meant to College Park than the Harpoon Tap Room in Terminal A of Boston’s Logan Airport on Monday night of Memorial Day. Dozens of Marylanders raised their glasses to memories of years past, the unpleasant ones washed away. Before it was time for three consecutive flights bound for Baltimore to take off, they chanted “T-E-R-P-S” in unison for the whole terminal to hear.
“We’re taking the trophy back College Park!” said Matt Heacock, Colin’s brother, as he boarded the Southwest Airlines flight back to the state of champions.