The chaos of Virginia’s immediate championship celebration last Memorial Day had abated slightly when the Cavaliers entered the postgame handshake line with Maryland.
Lars Tiffany distinctly remembers a request from Terrapin attackman Logan Wisnauskas after a title slipped out of his and his teammates’ grasp.
“Despite everything that had transpired and the pain of the loss, he asked me as we were shaking hands, ‘Coach, can we play a regular-season game next year?” Tiffany recalled this week.
It turns out they will Saturday at Washington D.C.’s Audi Field, the programs’ first regular-season meeting since Maryland left the ACC for the Big Ten after the 2014 season. And while it isn’t a showdown on the final day of the season, the game is still a barometer for two teams that haven’t lost since last year.
Virginia (6-0) has taken the last two meetings, a frantic quarterfinal rally in 2019 and then last year’s 17-16 classic to decide the national title. Maryland (6-0) hasn’t dropped a regular-season game since Feb. 18, 2020.
And now the sport gets a televised (on Big Ten Network), neutral-site showdown in the regular season that echoes the events held in pro football stadiums in Baltimore, East Rutherford, N.J., and Denver more than a decade ago. Only this time, it’s in a more intimate 20,000-seat facility.
“It’s not often we get such a highly anticipated matchup this early in the season,” Virginia defensive midfielder Grayson Sallade said. “It’s something we’ve obviously been looking forward to, and it’s been a really exciting time preparing for them these past few days. Just to see this type of lacrosse that’s going to be played on Saturday early in March is something exciting for everyone.”
What’s particularly exciting is putting the nation’s top two offenses on the field in the same game. Maryland leads the country with 17.5 goals a game, and just pounded Albany 24-6 — its largest single-game output since a 26-3 defeat of Radford in 1995. Virginia is just behind the Terps at 17.33 goals per outing.
There’s a veritable constellation of offensive stars in the matchup, with Wisnauskas (20 goals, 15 assists) and Cornell transfer Jonathan Donville (15 goals, five assists) leading Maryland, and Connor Shellenberger (15 goals, 25 assists) and Payton Cormier (21 goals) pacing Virginia.
While the Cavaliers have some more continuity on offense, with Matt Moore (11 goals, eight assists) also back, Maryland has a different look than a year ago when Jared Bernhardt turned in a 99-point season en route to the Tewaaraton Award.
“It sounds like BS, but we’re still trying to play 60 good minutes of lacrosse,” coach John Tillman said. “I’m not sure anyone is there yet, but we do have a lot of new guys playing. We have a lot of older guys playing on the defensive end. Most of the guys are returning guys, but on the offensive end, two out of the three attackmen are new. The second midfield is new. Donville’s a new piece. It’s not as easy as plug-and-play when you have new guys.”
Still, the consistency within Maryland’s program means Tillman knows what a normal progression is supposed to look like. The steadiness on defense, where the Terps are allowing 9.33 goals per game, has allowed Maryland to reach the midpoint of the regular season in solid shape.
Little wonder the Terps spent this week looking ahead to this year’s matchup with the Cavaliers rather than looking back on last May.
“Whatever happened in the past is the past,” defenseman Brett Makar said. “This is 2022 Maryland versus 2022 Virginia, and I don’t think it has anything to do with what happened before.”
Like Maryland, Virginia has a good sense of what a good season arc looks like. Tiffany described how the Cavaliers’ “systemic comprehension” — a combination of experience and success — is further ahead of how things have unfolded in Charlottesville early in his tenure.
That can’t be a pleasant thought for anyone else in the sport, who dealt with Virginia juggernauts in May in 2019 and 2021 but not necessarily in March of those seasons.
“I’m hopeful that what’s normally taken us a month and a half only took us half a month,” Tiffany said. “As you saw in our first couple games and maybe the first half against Towson, [we were] still trying to figure this out and not really clicking and flowing. But for many of our starts the last six years, that might have been five or six games.”
The Cavaliers might not be at their peak Saturday. Some of that is by design; the aim is to continue to improve throughout the season. And some of that is due to defenseman Cade Saustad’s “lower-extremity” injury. Tiffany said the redshirt junior, who missed last week’s victory at North Carolina, remains day to day but did not practice early in the week.
Nonetheless, there’s clearly a late-May vibe to this mid-March showdown.
“It’s not this critical do-or-die, and the last two times we have played Maryland, it was in the NCAA tournament,” Tiffany said. “It’s interesting because it’s not a playoff game, and it doesn’t have that winner-advances-loser-goes-home [element]. But it feels like it.”