This story was originally published in US Lacrosse Magazine following the 2015 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.

It felt more like a coronation than a celebration.

Hours after Denver defeated Maryland 10-5 to win its first NCAA lacrosse championship, the Pioneers boarded their private jet in Philadelphia, walnut-and-bronze trophy included. Local television affiliates arranged cameras at Denver International Airport and waited for the champs to return to the Rocky Mountains. The next morning, the Denver Post ran a front-page photo of teammates hoisting goalie Ryan LaPlante below a banner headline.

“Game changer.”

More than 2,000 supporters showed up at Hamilton Gymnasium on campus the day after Memorial Day. Michael Hancock, the city’s lively mayor, congratulated the team. 

“Three years ago, when we were awarded the presidential debate, everyone said this will put DU on the map,” Hancock said. “No, you put DU on the map.”

Hancock then leapt down from the stage and took a joyous selfie with the players, his spontaneous plunge punctuating what Lt. Gov. Joe Garcia had said earlier: “This is a big deal!”

John Elway, the Denver Broncos Hall of Fame quarterback and current team executive, tweeted congratulations. So did ESPN NFL reporter Adam Schefter to his nearly 4 million followers.

“We truly are the lacrosse capital of the West,” Pioneers coach Bill Tierney told the home crowd upon arrival. “It’s amazing.”

They are. Four final four appearances in five years and deep runs into the NCAA tournament finally culminated with Denver becoming the first champion “west of the Appalachians” or “west of North Carolina” or “west of the Mississippi.” Whatever your desired geographical marker, Denver winning the national title adds a dash of Colorado spice to an NCAA Division I men’s championship list filled with just nine other colleges and universities, all along the East Coast, in the tournament’s 45-year history.

The reality remains that when the word west is used in lacrosse, it is more representative of Revolutionary War-era standards than the coast-to-coast United States we know today. There are several Division I women’s programs in California and small college and club programs of both genders on the left side of the mighty Mississippi, but Denver and nearby Air Force in Colorado Springs are outliers at the more visible Division I men’s level, followed back east by Marquette in Wisconsin, and places like Michigan, Detroit and Notre Dame. The latter came within a semifinal overtime goal from tournament MVP Wes Berg of having its own chance to win an NCAA title.

Tierney, 62 and a Hall of Fame coach before he left Princeton and six NCAA championships behind in 2009 for a new project in Denver, wasted no time laying out the bigger picture after his Pioneers celebrated at Lincoln Financial Field. He became the first coach to win NCAA titles at two programs.

“I hope what it does is give some athletic directors some courage and some school presidents some courage, instead of hiding behind cost and hiding behind Title IX, to say that this is a sport that’s here to stay,” Tierney said. “This is a sport that means something in our country.”

If they do, it would be wise to follow in the Pioneers’ proverbial dust. The program has come a long way since alternating between club and varsity status before going Division I in 1999. Back then, coach Jamie Munro shared a cubicle with another staff member, and the team was an afterthought on campus. By the time Munro resigned 11 seasons later, the program had raised $10 million in that span and the lacrosse-only Peter Barton Stadium had already been erected on campus.

When Tierney was lured to Denver by athletic director Peg Bradley-Doppes, he stood on a patio overlooking the facility. The prospect of relocating to an area he wanted to retire and the subsequent challenge of starting anew was enticing. “It was a selfish decision,” Tierney said.

Reports at the time indicated Tierney could earn as much as $250,000 annually under the contract he signed in June 2009. In 2013, he signed an extension through 2017, and another may be on the way. The Pioneers’ travel budget is the largest in the country, as they annually make several trips east each season. They have a fully stocked roster of 47 players, representing 17 states, the District of Columbia and two Canadian provinces.

On the field, the Pioneers play an innovative brand of offense that embraces the indoor box skills that many of its players grew up knowing in Canada and preaches ball movement, unselfishness, on-the-fly thinking and quality shots. “We play field lacrosse,” offensive coordinator Matt Brown said. “But we utilize skills and techniques that are developed by playing true box lacrosse. There’s a difference there.”

Berg, who scored 15 goals in four tournament games, including five in the final, typifies that approach. Last summer, he was the youngest member of Canada’s gold medal team at the FIL World Championship, on which Brown also was the offensive coordinator. Berg then turned around a couple of weeks later and played for the Coquitlam Adanacs in a drive for the prestigious Canadian Minto Cup indoor crown. Brown watched live streams online as his star played, with Denver midfielder Tyler Pace as his teammate, against another future Pioneer, Brendan Bomberry. The Pioneers averaged 13.74 goals per game this season, seventh-best nationally. Berg, Pace and fellow box-trained mate Zach Miller were three of the team’s top-four scorers, and an American, Maryland transfer Connor Cannizzaro, set the Denver record for points in a season with 90.

Offense has been Denver’s trademark over the last few seasons. Tierney, the architect of the quick-slide defense at Princeton, embraced that. “I was always so obsessed with not giving up more than seven goals to win, and now I’m obsessed with scoring 13 to win,” he told LM back in 2012.

But in a storyline that flew relatively under the radar amid the westward-ho fanfare, the Pioneers got back to doing what worked when Tierney won all those titles at Princeton in the 1990s and early 2000s.

“Our defense is what won us the championship,” Brown said.

Denver led Notre Dame 10-6 with four minutes left in the semifinals before Irish midfielder Sergio Perkovic went beast mode (again) and scored three straight Irish goals to help force overtime. In the title game, the Pioneers’ defense, anchored by Christian Burgdorf, whom Tierney says could be one of the best he’s ever coached, co-captain Carson Cannon and LaPlante (13 saves) held the Terps to their lowest scoring output all year.

Maryland coach John Tillman bemoaned the current championship weekend format, with its quick Saturday-to-Monday turnaround. It did not bother Denver.

Freshman faceoff man Trevor Baptiste battled Terps senior Charlie Raffa to a near dead-heat. What a rookie year for Baptiste, a former junior Olympic swimmer and football player that was headed to Division III Franklin & Marshall for lacrosse less than 12 months earlier, but was spotted by Denver and committed after a late recruiting trip in March. Just like the old days.

Baptiste was the nation’s top faceoff man, winning nearly 70 percent during the regular season.

“With any winning team, you have to have guys that do their role,” Baptiste said. “Wes scores goals. Ryan stops the ball. My job is to get the ball. Everyone takes care of their job.”

The head job is Tierney’s, who said he has taken more of an oversight role compared to some earlier coaching stops. Assistants Brown, first-year defensive coordinator John Orsen and his son, Trevor, are more in touch with the players on X’s and O’s. Indeed, it was Brown in the locker room on Memorial Day telling the offense, “Let the ball create the rhythm. When we do that, no one can stop us.”

It was Trevor Tierney, the goalie for Princeton in 2001 when his father won his last title there, who addressed the Denver locker room with a special message after the dramatic OT win against Notre Dame. Back in 2000, his junior year at Princeton, the Tigers beat then-defending champion Virginia 12-11 in a similar edge-of-your-seat finish. They were so amped that they got little rest afterward, and lacked enough energy for Monday’s 60 minutes and lost to Syracuse 13-7.

“This is the one game you can’t celebrate,” he told them.

It was sobering but sage advice for a group that just made its first NCAA title game, despite all of the regular- and post-season successes of recent years.

“You constantly hear that, three out of four final fours, four out of five final fours, are they going to blow another one?” Bill Tierney said. “I kept looking at it saying, ‘You know what, hold on here, there’s 68 teams and you make four out of five final fours.’ That’s pretty good.”

The number of NCAA Division I men’s programs is up to 69 now, with 70 and 71 on the way in 2016 in the form of Cleveland State and Hampton, a historically black university. Like Denver and 2012 champ Loyola, the majority of additions in the last seven years have been smaller, private institutions with enrollments below 15,000 like Detroit, Jacksonville, Marquette, Mercer, High Point, Furman, Monmouth, Richmond and NJIT, which for the most part are located in or closer to the sport’s traditional hotbeds. Denver is one of three teams outside the Eastern Time zone. Recent startups Boston University and UMass-Lowell are larger schools, and Michigan was the biggest to make waves when it elevated its club team to varsity for the 2012 season.

University of Southern California administrators have considered men’s lacrosse in the past, and added a women’s team in 2013 that won its first NCAA tourney game this year. But if a California kid wants to go D-I and compete for a national title, his closest option is DU.

“A lot of people may look at where we are as a detriment,” Tierney said. “We just want young men that want to be at the University of Denver. If people don’t want to look in Tennessee and people don’t want to look in Texas and people don’t want to look in Washington and Oregon and California, good, we’ll keep looking there. And I think after today we may get a few eastern kids as well.”

Denver represents “weird constituencies,” Tierney admitted, for a sport that’s still in its growth stages. How else do you explain the Lacrosse Capital of the West playing in the Big East conference? Will the lasting legacy of this year’s team be a catalyst for expansion of lacrosse’s frontier regions?

It remains to be seen. But for now, these Pioneers will be happy to revel a little longer in their royal treatment.