Even though I consider Penn's women beating Maryland to be at least a mild upset, everyone at least expected the 4-seed Quakers to be serious Final Four contenders. They've been ranked in the top five for most of the season, ran the table in the Ivy League, had the 5-seed Terrapins at Franklin Field, had the incentive of playing the Final Four at home, and so on.
But what the Delaware men did yesterday down in Annapolis is really stunning. The 15-seed Blue Hens, who stunned 2-seed Virginia in the first round, upended 10-seed Maryland-Baltimore County (who themselves knocked off 7-seed Maryland in the first round) yesterday to advance to the Final Four in Baltimore on Saturday. The Terriers certainly provided easier opposition than the Cavaliers, but that's the second time this year the CAA has made national headlines in lacrosse after Drexel stunned U-Va at the beginning of the season.
(It's also the third time the CAA has knocked an ACC big boy off a lofty perch this year if you count national hero Eric Maynor's game-winning basket against Duke in the NCAA men's basketball Tournament. But I bet you the ACC still refuses to take the CAA seriously.)
Awaiting in M&T Bank Stadium will be Johns Hopkins, the Baltimore superpower that even some people who don't know what a lacrosse stick looks like might have heard is really good at the sport. And probably a good 20,000 or so of the Blue Jays' closest friends among a crowd likely to set yet another record for Final Four attendance.
That number will surely be helped by the other semifinal, in which the top-ranked team in the polls, Cornell, will face the tournament's No. 1 seed, Duke. The Big Red have had a season sort of similar to the year the St. Joe's basketball team ran the table and was atop the polls despite skeptics' claims that they didn't have enough quality wins.
Of course, the Blue Devils will get the lion's share of the attention, and with good reason. You can bet it will become the biggest story of all from this spring college sports season if they win it all.
