Johns Hopkins opened the NCAA men’s lacrosse tournament against seventh-seeded Cornell on Saturday at Schoellkopf Field in Ithaca, New York, with a quarterfinal berth in the balance. Faceoff was set for 5 p.m. on ESPNU in the first meeting between the teams in 14,229 days.
The winner advances to Hofstra on Saturday, May 16, to meet the survivor of Notre Dame and Jacksonville. Johns Hopkins came in after a 16-8 loss to Penn State in the Big Ten championship game on May 2 at Rutgers, while Cornell arrived after a 19-9 defeat to Princeton in the Ivy League title game on May 3 at home.
For Johns Hopkins, the game was another step in a season that sits inside one of the sport’s longest-running traditions. The Blue Jays are in their 139th season, dating to 1883, and entered the bracket with a 1,042-388-15 all-time record. They are the only men’s lacrosse program with more than 1,000 victories, a mark they reached with an 11-10 win over Loyola on Feb. 19, 2022.
The program’s history reaches far beyond one afternoon in upstate New York. Johns Hopkins owns 44 national championships, including nine NCAA titles, 29 USILA crowns and six ILA championships, and was making its 50th appearance in the NCAA Tournament. It missed the first NCAA Division I men’s lacrosse tournament in 1971, but then qualified for 41 straight years before slipping from the field in 2013. That 1972-2012 run remains the longest in Division I men’s lacrosse history.
Hopkins also brought a strong tournament record into the matchup, with a 73-40 mark in NCAA play, a 17-5 record in first-round games, 29 semifinal appearances and 18 trips to the championship game. It had also gone 9-2 all-time against the tournament’s seventh seed.
The polls suggested a close but meaningful edge for Cornell. Johns Hopkins was ranked ninth in both the USILA Coaches Poll and the KANE Inside Lacrosse Media Poll, while Cornell was sixth in the USILA rankings and fifth in the media poll. The USILA has issued 581 polls since 1973, and Hopkins has appeared in the top 20 in 556 of them and in the top 10 in 456.
There was one more wrinkle in the matchup: the calendar. Since 1950, this was Hopkins’ seventh game on May 9, and it had gone 4-2 in those games. The date fit a matchup that had waited 14,229 days to happen again, and the winner now had only one thing to do next — survive long enough to keep playing at Hofstra a week later.
