After four straight wins over top-ranked competition, the men's lacrosse team appeared to be on the fast track toward the NCAA Tournament. On Saturday, Harvard knocked Duke right off the track, upsetting the Blue Devils 15-13.
Despite the close score, Duke (5-3, 1-1 in the Atlantic Coast Conference) played perhaps its worst game of the season. The Blue Devils were unable to execute the strengths of their game that have led to their No. 8 national ranking.
"We're disappointed with the loss," junior midfielder Jim Gonnella said. "We've been playing well and today we just didn't have it."
The poor play by the Blue Devils was evident from the opening moments of the game. After freshman Scott Diggs scored the first goal of the game on a man-up situation 6:35 into the first quarter, Duke was shut out for the rest of the period. In the meantime, Harvard (3-0) notched two goals, including the first of senior Pat Marvin's four on the day.
In the opening quarter, the Blue Devils began a trend that lasted throughout the day-shooting at Harvard goalie Rob Lyng's feet. As a result of Duke's poor shot selection, Lyng had 16 saves on the day and the Blue Devils had difficulty putting the ball in the back of the net.
"We had our chances early in the game," Duke head coach Mike Pressler said. "I thought we really shot poorly in the first quarter and that proved to be the difference.... We shot at his feet. We were stupid the way we shot the ball. We were coached not to shoot at the kid's feet, but we shot at the kid's feet at some crucial times. When we start to shoot the ball high, good things happen to us."
Those good things became evident offensively in the second quarter, as the Blue Devils tallied six goals to tie the game at seven at the half. Sophomore John Fay scored the first two of his five goals, giving him an ACC-leading 29 goals on the season.
Despite Duke's offensive success in the second quarter, the period foreshadowed two more trends that would come back to haunt the Blue Devils later in the game-poor defense and a failure to stop Harvard off of faceoffs.
Although the teams ended up splitting the faceoffs for the game, Harvard's success at capitalizing on won faceoffs was a big difference in the game. Marvin led the Crimson's face-off attack, taking one the length of the field for a goal in the middle of the second quarter.
"That's something that just points to an individual performance," Harvard head coach Scott Anderson said. "Pat Marvin is not our normal face-off guy. We know that he can face off... but Pat's really the third guy. For him to do that much facing off, and he had a couple of goals today and he played a lot of defense, that's just a phenomenal individual effort."
Aiding Harvard in its scoring effort was the poor play by the Duke defense. The Blue Devils repeatedly failed to slow down Harvard's attackmen, who tallied 41 shots on Duke goalie Joe Kirmser.
"I was very disappointed with our defense," Pressler said. "That was the worst effort we've put together. Joe didn't play well. The guys in front of him didn't play well and they scored 15 goals. It's hard for me to believe that Harvard can score 15 on us."
With all of these trends developing, the Blue Devils completely fell apart for much of the second half. After Fay scored 3:28 into the third quarter, Duke was shut out for the next 17:44 of the game. At the same time, Harvard scored five unanswered goals to amass a 13-8 lead with 10 minutes remaining in the game.
At this point, the Blue Devils finally began to regroup. Fay scored at 6:12 in the fourth quarter, and Gonnella scored 1:29 later to bring Duke within three. Harvard scored minutes later to restore its lead to four. Yet Diggs and junior Alex Whitten scored within 15 seconds of each other to bring the margin back to two.
Seven seconds later, the effective Harvard face-off served to put the game away for the Crimson. Marvin won the face-off and passed to Jim Bevilacqua for Bevilacqua's third goal of the game, giving Harvard an insurmountable 15-12 lead.
"With our offense, we can score in bunches," Gonnella said. "We let them have a goal in the middle of our comeback, which kind of killed us again. It killed our momentum."
The Blue Devils will now try to regroup from Saturday's loss and prepare for their game at Massachusetts this Saturday. In addition to grabbing a much-needed win, the Blue Devils hope to use this game to rebuild their momentum going into their April 13 matchup against No. 1 Virginia.
"I've got to regroup these guys," Pressler said. "This is one that we definitely expected to get, but we've got some big games coming up. We're 5-3 right now and it's disappointing that Harvard beat us. But we've got to regroup. We've got UMass next weekend and we'll go from there."
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