Cicadas must love lacrosse.

Brood X went underground 17 years ago, shortly after Navy made M&T Bank Stadium rumble with its near-upset of mighty Syracuse and Mikey Powell exited stage left.

They surfaced this spring to see another transcendental talent in Charlotte North emerge from her exoskeleton with never-before-seen stick skills, while also heralding in K18’s last ride as Kyle Harrison gets set to retire after the Premier Lacrosse League season.

Forgive our bug-eyed friends for questioning the concept of parity. They were sucking xylem from tree roots as nymphs beneath the earth when Johns Hopkins (2005), North Carolina (2016) and Maryland (2017) ended long NCAA championship droughts and when Duke (2010), Loyola (2012), Denver (2015) and Yale (2018) crashed the party.

They might even be disappointed to find a world in which the national champion still wore some shade of orange — considering either Princeton, Syracuse or Virginia had claimed every NCAA title from 1992-2004 — if it were not for the fact that this year’s Maryland-UVA final might have been the best game they’ve ever witnessed.

Boston College? National champs? When the cicadas last saw daylight, the Eagles were 6-11 and winless in the Big East — perennial bottom-dwellers like themselves.

Personally, I don’t remember the great cicada invasion of 2004. I was a senior in college. That might explain why.

But there was also a great lacrosse invasion that year. From 2003 to 2004, total participation in the sport increased 16.7 percent to more than 350,000 players nationally, according to USA Lacrosse research. In lacrosse parlance, “fastest-growing sport in the country” became as ubiquitous as “fastest game on two feet.” Today, that number is closer to 835,000.

Thanks to the career longevity provided these days by the PLL, USA Lacrosse and now Athletes Unlimited, the cicadas need not fret about missing generational talents like Rob Pannell, Paul Rabil, Lyle Thompson and Taylor Cummings — they’ll be plenty active this summer. The clumsy fliers might not get over to Europe to see Pat Spencer dunk on pros, but they’ve had enough excitement for one outing, wouldn’t you say?

— Matt DaSilva, Editor in Chief

This article appears in the May/June edition of USA Lacrosse Magazine. Join our momentum.

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