When Lars Tiffany left Brown to take over the men’s lacrosse program at Virginia nearly a year ago, Tiffany promised more of the same.

He vowed to continue the up-and-down, run-and-gun, transition-fueled style of lacrosse that had reaped huge dividends in Providence, where last year’s Brown Bears took that style and ran with it — nearly all the way to the school’s first-ever Division I championship.

When Mike Daly left his head coaching job at Division III powerhouse Tufts last year after 18 seasons — and three national titles dating to 2010 — to assume the same job at Brown, he was determined to continue the fast-playing, high-scoring methods that had served Tufts so well, while influencing numerous Division I schools such as Brown.

Both head coaches essentially delivered what was expected, starting with lots of offense and a good share of sketchy days on defense. Each team put much pressure on its faceoff specialists and goalies. Each team sought to control games with extra possessions that would help them to win shootouts. Each team hunted constantly for transition scoring opportunities.

After the regular season had concluded for each squad, only one team was still happy this week.

Brown (9-5) bounced back after a 1-3 start to win eight of its next 10 games and is riding a four-game winning streak into this weekend’s Ivy League tournament as the No. 3 seed in the semifinals against second-seeded Princeton. The Bears, who lost to Maryland in last year’s NCAA tournament semifinals, need to win out in New Haven to make the NCAAs as an automatic qualifier.

There is no such suspense in Charlottesville, where Virginia has concluded its regular season with an 8-7 record and will miss its third NCAA tournament in the past five years.

The Cavaliers, with an offense coached by former Tufts assistant Sean Kirwan, who followed Tiffany from Brown to UVA, averaged 14.4 goals (fourth-highest in Division I as of May 1).

The Cavs produced three all-conference players in sophomore midfielder Ryan Conrad, senior attackman Zed Williams and freshman attackman Michael Kraus — the league’s Rookie of the Year — yet failed to qualify for last month’s Atlantic Coast Conference tournament.

UVA also failed once again to beat an ACC team in the regular season. Virginia is an astonishing 1-19 in its last 20 games against the ACC.

A porous defense and an inconsistent showing by its faceoff unit summed up Virginia’s plight in 2017. The Cavs, who spent the entire season near the bottom of Division I in scoring defense, wound up ranked 65th out of 69 schools after allowing an average of 13.27 goals per game.

Statistically, Brown’s regular season looked a lot like Virginia’s. The Bears rank third in the nation with a scoring average of 14.43 goals and are 62nd in scoring defense (12.93 GAA). The average of shots taken by Virginia (46.3 per game) and Brown (45.7) is nearly identical.

But clearly, over the second half of Brown’s season, which included a schedule more favorable than any member of the ACC — expected to send four teams to the NCAA tournament — the Bears tightened up enough on offense and defense to position themselves to win the Ivy title and gain that league’s only expected invitation to the dance.

“We committed to this style of play the first day we came together as a staff. We know we’re never going to win that [scoring defense] category,” Tiffany said. “But in the end, our defense was too fragile, we played an excessive amount of it, and we wore down. That’s one of the potential pitfalls of our style.”

“We still don’t want to get away from playing as fast as we can and generating as much offense as we can. We weren’t as good off the ground [in transition] as we needed to be this year,” he added. “There’s no question we have to better on defense, in our man-to-man and with our help. But this [kind of offense] is what we believe in, and we really wanted to install that this year.”

Tiffany lamented Virginia’s 3-4 record in one-goal games. The Cavs dropped one-goal decisions to Syracuse (14-13), Notre Dame (11-10 in OT), Johns Hopkins (18-17) and Penn, which ended up sweeping a nonc-onference series from UVA, first with an 11-10 win on Feb. 25, then with a 17-11 thumping in the ACC Showcase game in Durham on Saturday.

Virginia’s frustration in large part can be traced to its failure to support an offensive approach designed to generate and tolerate turnovers. UVA is tied for 55th with 15.13 turnovers per game, while Brown ranks 66th with 16.93 miscues per contests.

In the specialty areas of facing off and goaltending, Brown has gotten it done more proficiently this year. A year after losing the game’s best specialty combination to graduation — first-team All-American goalie Jack Kelly and second-team All-American faceoff man Will Gural — the Bears have held up in 2017.

Led by junior Ted Ottens (64.7 faceoff win percentage) the Bears have won a solid 61 percent of their draws, sixth in Division I. Freshman goalie Phil Goss ranks a middling 37th in save percentage (51.2).

But Goss, who, like Virginia’s goalie tandem of junior Will Railey and freshman Griffin Thompson, regularly saw more than 40 shots per game, is tied for fourth in Division I with 12.43 saves per game.

Among his finer efforts was the 19-save gem that proved to be the difference in an 11-8 win over Penn on April 8. That victory sparked Brown, which has won five of its last six games.

Virginia’s showing at the faceoff dot and between the pipes was less reliable. The Cavs leaned on the faceoff combination of freshman Luke Brugel and redshirt junior Jason Murphy and won a respectable 52.7 percent of their attempts.

UVA was unsettled in the cage in 2017. Matt Barrett, the incumbent starter, was arrested for drug possession over the summer and suspended indefinitely from the team. Near midseason, Thompson relieved Railey as the starter. Both keepers struggled with consistency in stopping shots behind a unit that was unsteady throughout the year — maybe never more so than on March 25. That day at Homewood Field, Hopkins outscored the Cavs 9-3 to turn a 14-9 fourth-quarter deficit into an 18-17 victory in overtime.

Railey finished the year by allowing 13.42 goals per game and saving 43.4 percent of the shots he faced. Thompson (12.89 GAA, 48.8) fared better, but not enough to get Virginia into the postseason.

Brown’s recovery from a wild and ineffective start has been impressive. After dropping a 17-15 contest to Villanova on March 7, the Bears stood at 1-3 and were allowing 16 goals per game, including a 25-17 thrashing by Stony Brook in their first loss.

Daly said by no means did he try to alter Brown’s overall preference for an up-tempo style. However, the Bears began to pick more spots to apply the brakes, whether by taking more judicious shots, by extending more possessions to rest their defense or milk chunks of clock, or by steering more opposing shooters outside to give Goss better chances to prevail in one-on-one confrontations.

“[Brown] is still looking to get out [in transition] a lot and score, no question about it,” said Yale coach Andy Shay, who recalled a snapshot from the Bulldogs’ 18-12 win over the Bears on April 15. “One of their poles ran down the field and made a 30- or 40-yard bounce pass that resulted in a score — an absolutely sick play. But [the Bears] have definitely slowed some things down.”

Daly says his staff made the early-season determination that the offense, which lost several big weapons to graduation in 2016, needed some time to grow around senior attackman and Tewaaraton Award winner Dylan Molloy. He has been outstanding again with 38 goals and 25 assists, both team-highs.

Among the players who have emerged are freshman attackmen Jack Kniffin (20 goals, 10 assists) and Luke McCaleb (23, 18) and junior midfielder Stephen Hudak (29 goals).

“It wasn’t our schematics or talent that was hurting us earlier in the season. We just weren’t finishing plays,” Daly said. “We were frustrated to be 1-3, but it wasn’t like we were a thousand plays away [from fixing things].”

Brown has allowed an average of 19 goals in its five losses, has lost only once since suffering a 21-11 rout at Princeton nearly five weeks ago, and is a confident group heading into Friday’s Ivy semifinals.

The combination of sturdy faceoff play and goaltending and the development of Molloy’s supporting cast have yielded some encouraging trends for the Bears. During its current, 8-2 run, Brown has won a pair of overtime decisions, has held four opponents to single-digit scoring, has won six times by three goals or fewer and has allowed a solid average of 9.75 goals in its eight victories.

In other words, the Bears are figuring how to control tempo effectively enough to finish games, without abandoning their core beliefs.

“We really wouldn’t care if we were 14-0 and had scored 14 goals while giving up none,” Daly said. “We’re getting stops. We’re winning faceoffs. We’re still scoring lots of goals. It’s pretty easy to coach this team now. We wanted to be playing our best lacrosse at this point.”

“We still want to play up-tempo,” he added. “But we try to coach in the now. Make no mistake. Everything we do has been about giving our team the best chance to win.”