DURHAM, N.C. — North Carolina’s ACC women’s lacrosse semifinal contest with Virginia Tech marked the sixth game in two days on the turf of Duke’s Koskinen Stadium, the tournament’s host field. One of those games was delayed for two hours by a torrential downpour. That game, Virginia Tech’s late-night quarterfinal game Thursday against Duke, ended just 19 hours before the Hokies took the field to face North Carolina.
Perhaps inevitably, neither the field’s turf nor the Hokies’ legs made it through the night intact, as North Carolina won a muddy, mistake- and fatigue-filled game 14-8 to advance to Sunday’s championship game against Boston College.
“We didn’t have the legs,” said Virginia Tech coach John Sung. “You could see we weren’t at our best, and we made a lot of mental mistakes. We used a lot to get out of last night.”
The Hokies beat Duke 13-12 early Friday morning in a game that, due to weather delays, lasted more than five hours and ended close to 1 a.m. “By the time we got back to the hotel and got the kids fed, it was 2 a.m.,” Sung said.
Still, it took a career performance from UNC goalie Taylor Moreno to put the Hokies out of the tournament. The redshirt freshman goalie tied a career high with 17 saves, one short of the ACC tournament record. Marie McCool, Ela Hazar and Jamie Ortega eached scored three goals. Hazar recorded one assist, enough to break her own school record for assists in a season at 41.
Tristan McGinley, McCool’s high school teammate, led the Hokies with two goals, despite facing aggressive double teams from the Tar Heel defense.
If Virginia Tech was shaking off the cobwebs of its late night slugfest with Duke, North Carolina appeared to be crashing from the sugar rush of its 21-goal outburst against Syracuse the day before. After 20 minutes of play — a time marker by which the Tar Heels had scored 11 on Syracuse the day before — Virginia Tech led 3-2 as sloppy play plagued both teams.
“We were super flat,” UNC coach Jeny Levy said. “In-game adjustments is part of the fun of the game, and we made some personnel changes.”
The Tar Heels woke up starting at just under 10 minutes left in the first half, scoring five times in four minutes to take a comfortable 7-3 lead, then added a final goal with six seconds left in the half when Kara Klages scored on a free position shot. That sequence was set up by a Moreno save with 30 seconds to go, a momentum swing that UNC carried into the second half by scoring the first two goals after the break to open a decisive 10-3 advantage.
North Carolina, the tournament’s No. 2 seed, will face undefeated and top-seeded Boston College in the championship on Sunday. The teams last met in March, when Boston College dominated second-half draws to beat the Tar Heels 17-11, one of the worst losses North Carolina has suffered in the career of any current player.
“We got into some foul trouble and some [draw] trouble,” said Levy. “We’re going to have to work really hard in the circle. But we’re both entirely different teams now, at least we’re an entirely different team. It’s April, and we’re finding our stride.”
The second half was mostly dominated by North Carolina, as fatigue and an increasingly muddy field led Virginia Tech into a series of penalties and yellow cards. But one highlight of that stretch came during one of those sequences. After a yellow card halfway through the period, the Hokies were a man-down, but goalie Meagh Graham made a save and passed to Kristen Kohles, a senior defender, on an outlet. Missing a player, Kohles found no one to pass to, so she sprinted upfield, as Carolina’s players clearly waited for her to pass. Instead, she made a beeline for the goal, dodging two different Tar Heels inside the restraining line and firing a bounce shot that caught Moreno on the right hip.
In her 70th game as a starter for the Hokies, Kohles had her first goal.