Acacia Walker-Weinstein has a cold.

It’s bad enough that Walker-Weinstein is headed home for the day, even though it’s barely noon. These are not the normal working hours of a Division I head coach chasing a third straight national championship game. Long days, late nights and lost weekends are more the norm.

But it’s only mid-November, and Boston College’s fall ball season is behind her and it’s still 90 days or so until the Eagles open their season as perhaps the most talent-stacked college women’s lacrosse team in recent memory.

As Walker-Weinstein heads home, despite the head cold, she names the team’s pillars: returning Tewaaraton Award winner Sam Apuzzo, a former final four MVP in Kenzie Kent, the 2018 national defender of the year in Elizabeth Miller and first-team All-American midfielder Dempsey Arsenault. The team’s offensive coordinator is former Syracuse All-American Kayla Treanor, one of the game’s all-time most prolific players and the top scorer on the 2017 U.S. World Cup team.

“They can be unstoppable if they want to be,” Walker-Weinstein says.

Walker-Weinstein talks about coaching philosophy, how the offseason is the time a team has to develop strong leaders, the influence John Wooden and Bill Belichick have had on her coaching style and this one incredibly cool picture of midfielder Hannah Hyatt that, she thinks, captures everything she wants her players to be, diving out of bounds to beat a North Carolina player to a shot. Walker-Weinstein calls Hyatt an unsung hero.

“She’s really dynamic,” Walker-Weinstein says. “She faceguards. She’s good one-versus-one. She’s a great leader. She makes all the gritty hustle plays you need someone to make.”

And Walker-Weinstein leaves no wiggle room about expectations: An NCAA title is the only goal for this team.

“We 100-percent always talk about winning a national championship. Getting close is not enough,” Walker-Weinstein says. “For some reason, we haven’t done it yet. We have a lot of work to do.”

BC opens the 2019 season as a clear favorite to do so. The Eagles, after all, were oh so close these last two seasons, falling in the NCAA championship game to Maryland and James Madison, respectively.

Walker-Weinstein is the heartbeat of her Boston College team, as positive and relaxed and happy as any coach might be heading into a season which could have many different endings, but only one acceptable outcome.

“Her positive energy is like nothing I’ve ever seen,” says Hyatt, a senior defender. “You think, ‘Oh, this is her one day of bringing it?’ She brings it every single second of the day.”

“It’s always fun this time of year,” Walker-Weinstein says. “We’re trying to fine-tune smaller things, get our systems in. We’ll add more in January, but this time of year we’re molding the team’s intangibles, learning to work together.”

“For Acacia, relationships are huge,” says Kent, who is back with the Eagles after taking a year off to recover from playing ice hockey. She’s a pro prospect in both sports. “It’s just having the best relationships on the team. She thinks that correlates on the field. She wants us to hold each other accountable before coaches get involved.”

Though BC’s roster is almost laughably loaded, super teams are not uncommon in women’s lacrosse. What are rare, at least recently, are such teams actually finishing a season on top. In 2016, Maryland was the two-time defending champion, with Taylor Cummings as the two-time defending Tewaaraton winner, surrounded by a sea of blue-chip talent. Yet in the 2016 title game, the Terps lost to a North Carolina team that had almost no seniors.

Then in 2017, those Tar Heels, brimming with All-Americans, were bumped from the NCAA tournament in the quarterfinals by Navy. That same weekend, BC qualified for its first championship weekend, becoming the tournament’s so-called Cinderella team. Apuzzo, Arsenault and, in particular, Kent broke through on the national stage — particularly Kent, who scored 10 points in the final against Maryland and 37 points in the tournament, obliterating the previous NCAA tournament record of 26.

It made 2018 look like the year when BC couldn’t miss. Until, one piece at a time, it did.

First, Kent took the season off to concentrate on hockey and get some much-needed rest. The Eagles are perennial Frozen Four contenders, meaning in 2017, Kent’s in-season demands stretched from the beginning of September through the end of May.

But Apuzzo responded with an astonishing offensive year. She amassed 88 goals, 41 assists and 163 draw controls on the way to becoming BC’s first Tewaaraton winner. 

Still, after an undefeated regular season, BC saw its invincibility crack in the ACC championship game, losing to North Carolina. Then came the one-goal loss to upstart James Madison in the NCAA championship game Memorial Day weekend.

Now 2019 becomes the year of the Eagles. For the first time, Apuzzo and Kent join forces for a full season. Moreover, BC added the nation’s No. 1 recruiting class, according to Inside Lacrosse, headlined by a pair of Long Island products in Jenn Medjid and Cassidy Weeks who are top-10 prospects.

“With teams [that didn’t win] like North Carolina and Maryland, the thing to learn is it doesn’t matter how good the individuals are,” Walker-Weinstein says. “If players don’t sacrifice everything for the team, and have ridiculous relationships on the team, you’re not gonna win. It’s always the intangibles and not actual lacrosse.”

All of that, says Hyatt, is on the minds of this year’s seniors and team leaders every day.

“We’d gotten out of that take-it-slow, one-game-at-a-time mindset after our first trip to the national championship as sophomores,” Hyatt says. “Our junior year, they still called us a Cinderella team, though the way we performed in the regular season was a clear identifier we were not. Maryland and UNC always had that target, and that’s what bit them in the butt. We know that every single team we play wants to kick our butts. That’s why we have to stay grounded.”

If BC sits at the top of the lacrosse pyramid today, it started the climb there in 2005 under coach Bowen Holden.

“I’m not surprised at all,” Holden says. “When I took the job in 2005, I felt like I had so many resources and so much going for me. It’s an incredible school that draws great kids and great athletes.”

Holden inherited a program with great potential, but limited success. From 1992-2005, the Eagles amassed a record of 90-122. They struggled in the Big East, going 5-24 during their five seasons in the conference before migrating to the ACC in 2006, Holden’s first season at the helm.

“I never went into a season or game expecting to get our butts kicked and never would have wanted my players to expect that,” Holden says. “We did [get our butts kicked] sometimes, but what I really remember is the athletes there were willing to take on much different expectations put on them.”

Holden left BC in 2012 with a record of 64-60, including winning seasons in her final three years, though her Eagles teams never threatened to win the then-six team ACC. The Eagles made the ACC semifinals and the program’s first NCAA tournament in 2011. After lean early years, her Eagles got the program’s first noteworthy victory in 2008, shocking seventh-ranked North Carolina. Blue-chip recruits like Covie Stanwick and Mikaela Rix, and diamonds in the rough like Kristin Igoe and Sarah Mannelly, helped to turn the tide and set the table for BC’s remarkable rise the last two years.

Holden has watched the Eagles grow into national title contenders while the players she recruited have started careers — Igoe played for Team USA in the 2013 FIL Women’s World Cup — and families. Watching both, she says, has been satisfying to see.

“I get the sense that alums feel they are part of today’s success,” Holden says. “They have a sense that they had a hand in it. The team would not be here today without every woman who went before.” 

As a recruit, Hyatt had a stark unique introduction to a Boston mindset. She grew up in Park City, Utah. With a population of 8,000 people, an elevation of 7,000 feet and more than 300 ski runs in the city limits, it’s a far cry from BC’s Chestnut Hill campus. Hyatt played lacrosse in the small mountain town, then joined an elite touring club out of California in high school, which led to a recruiting visit to Boston in the middle of April 2013 — the same week two bombs went off at the Boston Marathon.

The self-described “mountain girl” from Utah quickly learned all she needed to know about the school and the city.  For nearly a week, most of Boston shut down as the hunt for the bombers went on. The city’s single-minded reaction to the bombing remains a fierce source of local pride.

“The coaches were like, ‘This is not a good weekend to come for your first time,’” Hyatt says. “But it was an incredible thing to see. It was an unfortunate circumstance, but it was amazing to see that whole community being brought together.”

The brush with history struck a nerve in Hyatt, as Walker-Weinstein made her pitch that the program was starting to build something great.

“It’s cheesy, but as soon as I got to that campus, I got the feeling,” Hyatt says. “I felt like they were building something special, and Acacia was just nonstop talking about what she was bringing to table.” 

Now Hyatt is part of one of the most talented senior classes in NCAA history, with Kent, Apuzzo, Arsenault and Miller. Still, it’s a group that has never won so much as a conference championship trophy, let alone the two losses in the NCAA final.

“Winning a national championship is something we talk about every single day,” Kent says. “That is the message: What did we do wrong? How do we fix it? We are upping the ante in every cylinder possible.”

It is this mental aspect of the game — preparing the minds of her players as much as their skills and bodies — that Walker-Weinstein believes can be her biggest advantage. She studies the famous coaches for every hint.

“I read John Wooden stuff all the time,” Walker-Weinstein says of the legendary UCLA basketball coach. “Kayla and I both watch documentaries on coaches and teams we love.”

Walker-Weinstein even studies the press conferences of New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick. This seems a bit hard to believe, that the gregarious, upbeat and wide-open Walker-Weinstein would ever emulate the famously terse and tight-lipped football coach who happens to have a soft spot for lacrosse.

“I listen to a lot to sports radio, breaking down what he says and what he doesn’t say,” Walker-Weinstein says. “I feel like if you listen to what he’s saying, there are strong messages. If you know what to listen for, you can learn from it.”

Though it seems like Walker-Weinstein is unlikely to ever exhaust the topics of her team or coaching styles, she eventually exhausts the road to her house and hangs up. But she then quickly texts back. She wants to make sure she had been positive enough. “Hate to seem negative,” she writes.

Well, she did say she had that cold.