Odd things happen in the NCAA lacrosse tournament.
But it isn’t often a higher seeded team’s offense gets snuffed out at home.
That’s what happened yesterday at Notre Dame, where the seventh-seeded Fighting Irish were silenced against Maryland.
It marked only the third time in tournament history that a higher seeded team scored three goals or less at home; the others were 1984 Virginia (a fourth seed that lost 11-2 to fifth-seeded North Carolina) and 1992 Navy (an eighth seed that fell 9-3 to unseeded Yale).
There is another instance of a home team getting almost entirely shut down. Seventh-seeded Duke was forced to play at unseeded Hobart in 2000, then promptly eviscerated the Statesmen 13-1.
One more interesting note: All three of those teams with impressive defensive stands lost in the next round.
