Kaitlyn Ridenour could have been wrapping up her first year of teaching elementary school children.

Instead, the Northeast Conference’s consensus best defender returned to Mount St. Mary’s to earn her master’s and help the women’s lacrosse team to its first NCAA tournament since 2005. The Mount defense held Wagner scoreless over the final 21:45, and the Mountaineers rallied to edge Wagner 9-8 on Beanie Colson’s goal with 4.7 seconds left in overtime in the NEC final Saturday.

“This smile has not been wiped off my face since Saturday since we won,” Ridenour said. “It just feels amazing. I was up Saturday night; I couldn’t sleep. You tear up just even thinking about it. We worked so hard for it. It’s what me and Kate [Kinsella] came back for, for the fifth year to get that ring and finally be successful and have that taste of winning. It’s indescribable.”

The Mount (14-2 overall) takes its 14-game winning streak to seventh-seeded Duke on Friday at 3 p.m. in first-round NCAA tournament action. The winner faces the Maryland-High Point winner in the second round Sunday. And while Duke has motivation from questions rising about receiving a seed, the Mountaineers have been fueled by prognosticators eyeing a second-round Duke-Maryland matchup that assumes they will lose.

“We’re going to go down there and give it our all,” Ridenour said. “We have nothing to lose. I’m so excited to be a part of the NCAA tournament. We’re going to fight.”

The fight to get to the NCAA tournament hasn’t been easy. It’s been a slow and sometimes even painful build since Lauren Skellchock took over the program in 2015. In her first three years, the Mountaineers won just 15 games total. But things began to turn in 2017 when Ridenour’s class arrived — Skellchock’s first recruiting class she could call her own.

“People are forced to look at us now,” Ridenour said. “Between [Skellchock] and the classes she recruited, we changed the whole morale of the program.”

In 2018, the Mountaineers had their first winning NEC season since 2015, though that season ended with a one-goal loss to Bryant in the NEC tournament. In 2019, the Mount went 16-3 overall and a perfect 7-0 in the NEC and eyed an NCAA berth but were upset 7-6 in overtime to Wagner in the NEC final. Last year, Skellchock felt she had her best team yet, and the COVID-19 pandemic ended the year after a 6-1 start.

“I remember asking one of my colleagues — she actually coaches at UConn now, Katie Woods — I remember asking her my first year, ‘How long does it take to feel like it’s your program?’” Skellchock said. “I remember her saying, ‘It’s going to take six or seven years.’ That seems so long, but now that I’m in that moment, I know what she means. Your team knows your systems, they know your philosophies, you’ve built your leadership, you’ve built your culture. You have that immediate buy-in from your freshmen. We’ve created exceptional role models in our leadership, in our senior classes. I know now what that feels like, and I know how well prepared we are for this moment.”

The final hump was winning the NEC tournament to secure the conference’s automatic qualifier. And despite another perfect NEC regular season that included two convincing wins over Wagner, the Mountaineers found themselves trailing the Seahawks 8-4 with 18:50 to go — their largest deficit of the season, even bigger than what they faced in their opening two losses to Towson (10-7) and Navy (12-10). Wagner held the Mount to a season-low three goals in the first half in part due to faceguarding Kinsella, the NEC’s Offensive Player of the Year. That’s when the veteran poise and that new mindset fostered over the previous four years kicked in.

“Never in my mind did I think that Wagner was really controlling the game,” Ridenour said. “I knew we were going to win; I just didn’t know how we were going to do it yet.”

Skellchock couldn’t help but think about some of the one-goal frustrations that the Mount had suffered in her earlier seasons. She remained positive because of everything that she had seen from her senior leadership through practices and games this season.

“We certainly are a different team than we’ve ever been,” Skellchock said. “That’s because of how we always play defensive and how we’ve played offensively.”

The Mount scored back-to-back goals before another delay in their ultimate championship goal — nearby lighting halted the game for almost 40 minutes. The Mount scored once when play resumed and tied it when its third graduate student, Sara Moeller who came from Stony Brook, bounced one in for an 8-8 tie that sent it to overtime, when Colson took a feed from Alayna Pagnotta and sent the Mountaineers to the NCAA tournament.

“As many would say, the monkey is off the back,” Skellchock said. “I’ve been at the Mount for seven years. Excluding last year, I feel like we’ve slowly climbed that mountain. It feels really good. Especially for these seniors, they’ve worked so hard. I’m just really excited for this group of leaders to take that next step for our program.”

The Mount defense made the comeback possible by getting stingier over the final 20 minutes. It switched effectively to a zone defense before the lightning delay, then back to man after the delay. Ridenour was named the MVP of the NEC tournament.

“We definitely went in and out of different defenses throughout the game,” Skellchock said. “We were in our man. Went to zone. Went to high pressure defense. From the moment I got to the Mount, I’ve felt like defense has been a high priority for us. They’ve been the backbone of our teams.”

Ridenour, the two-time NEC Defender of the Year, has helped solidify that end along with a lineage of talented goalies that includes Jenna Oler now and her back-up, Madison Bradley, after Jillian Petito set the tone in Skellchock’s early years.

“It starts with that defensive unit, that leadership that we have,” Skellchock said. “Kaitlyn is a tremendous part of that. She is a lockdown defender, she’s a vocal leader, she’s the energy and attitude and spark plug. And her teammates believe in her. That’s really, really important to be able to look to someone next to you and really be able to trust them as a defensive slide or when they’re on ball. She’s one of the best players that I have ever coached. She certainly continues to leave her mark on our program.”

Ridenour is finalizing where she will be teaching next fall, but she has been thrilled by the results of her decision to stay for one final season to help the Mountaineers make history. The Mount has the chance to add to its spectacular year before it bids farewell to a group of seniors that has been program-changing.

“There are a lot of us leaving,” Ridenour said. “Hopefully we put in a mindset to those younger girls that we come to the Mount and we win. We’re holding ourselves to a high standard, and [Skellchock] is going to push them hard next fall to get ready for the season. Hopefully they have learned enough and they like the taste of winning enough to keep it rolling.”