FOXBOROUGH, Mass. -- The noise coming from Ohio State’s men’s lacrosse team room was tough to ignore. Sounds of players cheering and screaming started in the halls Gillette Stadium’s field level, spilled into the Buckeyes’ locker room, even seeping through to Towson’s postgame press conference.

It was an atmosphere fit for an Ohio State team that had just punched its ticket to its first NCAA championship game in school history. The achievement magnified by the fact that when the Buckeyes had last come out of the locker room, they were down four goals to the unseeded Towson Tigers and 30 minutes from elimination.

After a lackluster first half that saw Ohio State turn the ball over eight times against a steady Towson defense, it was down 7-3. The Buckeyes had lost the first-half faceoff battle and the Tigers’ pounded 25 shots on goalie Tom Carey.

At halftime, Myers preached to his team to stick to the gameplan — Withers, the No. 4 faceoff man in the country, would win his battle with Towson’s Alex Woodall and the offense would eventually get in sync. There was no panic for the Buckeyes.

“We got in at halftime and really just needed to take a hard look at ourselves and settle down,” Myers said. “We've been in that situation before. We've been in a lot of different situations this season. We just chatted and said, listen, we're good to close the gap in the third and win it in the fourth. It just felt like that was a calming sense across the locker room. We all looked at each other like, yeah, we can do that.”

For the seniors, like attackman J.T. Blubaugh, it was all about extending the season.

“Throughout this whole run, I've just been asking all the underclassmen and everyone, just give me another week,” he said. “Before we went out after halftime, I said give me two more days.”

Thanks to Withers, who won 10 of 13 second-half faceoffs, the Buckeyes scored eight times in the second half, including two four-goal runs, to take the lead in the fourth quarter on a Towson team that allowed just 7.44 goals per game and had not lost when leading at half all season. Erik Evans knocked down a pass from Towson’s Tyler Young with just seconds remaining to seal Ohio State’s 11-10 NCAA semifinal win.

Myers and his team stuck to its identity, and it will ride that into Monday’s national championship game, where the Buckeyes will face either Maryland or Denver — both teams that Ohio State has beaten this season.

“I think this team has been seasoned in a lot of different ways, so you go back to that Maryland game we had in the regular season, and we were down 7-2 against a pretty tough Maryland team,” Myers said. “We came back and won that game in overtime. You can reflect with your group on, hey, we've been here in this situation. We know what we need to do.”

Freshman Tre Leclaire was one of the stars of Ohio State’s offense coming into the game, and he showed up in the explosive second half, scoring two of his three goals to lead the team back.

“In the first half we felt a little rushed,” Leclaire said. “We felt like we needed to do something. We came out in the second half, and we said we each need to calm down, take a deep breath and run our offense, and it worked.”

Towson had the upperhand for much of the first half, winning its individual matchups all over the field. Woodall won seven of 12 faceoffs, and the Tiger defense forced the Buckeyes into eight turnovers in the period. 

With a clear advantage in possessions, Towson settled into its slow, methodical offense led by senior Joe Seider and Ryan Drenner. Both Seider and Drenner had multiple goals in the first half to help Towson jump out to a four-goal lead. 

Had it not been for eight saves from Carey, the Tigers could have held an even larger halftime lead.

With Withers’ dominance at the faceoff x in the second half, the Buckeyes won the time of possession battle in the second half and took hold of the game. They also won 17 ground balls in the half, compared to eight from the Tigers.

It helped that Woodall, who had entered the game with a hamstring injury he suffered earlier in the tournament, left late in the third quarter. His replacement, Connor Harryman, who just one of his four faceoffs against Withers.

“They had the ball more,” Towson coach Shawn Nadelen said, simply, of the difference in the second half. “A good offensive team has the ball more and they're that much more dangerous. … I think what really hampered us was the way the faceoffs went, and we had to play a lot of defense.”

Ohio State flipped the script in the second half, and it earned two more days in Foxborough and a date in the national championship game.

“I don't know what I'm going to say at halftime on Monday because it's the last one,” Blubaugh said. “Got me all the way to the finish line, and that's just, you know, I can't thank them enough."