Duke arrived at the NCAA Division I men's lacrosse tournament without a seed and with a chip the size of Wallace Wade Stadium on its shoulder. On Sunday they cashed the chip in spectacular fashion, dismantling Georgetown 16-6 to crash the Final Four and set up a semifinal showdown with top-seeded Princeton on May 23.
Max Sloat was the central figure on a Duke attack that played its best lacrosse of the season. The senior attackman finished with four goals and one assist, the kind of multi-dimensional performance that has been his calling card across the playoffs. Sloat's shooting selection — a mix of low-to-low finishes from up-top dodges and quick sticks off feeds — punished a Georgetown defence that had spent the tournament thriving on second-and-third slides.
Benn Johnston added a hat trick, and his three goals came in critical patches of the contest, each one extending the Duke lead at moments where Georgetown might otherwise have engineered a comeback. Cal Girard, the Duke faceoff specialist whose dominance has quietly become one of the tournament's running storylines, also delivered a coast-to-coast highlight goal off a faceoff win — the kind of play that ends Tuesday morning chalkboard sessions for opposing coaches.
Goalkeeper Buck Cunningham was the spine of the result. The Duke senior posted ten saves against a Georgetown attack that found the angle of its shots well early in the game but increasingly resorted to lower-percentage perimeter looks as Cunningham's positioning narrowed the cage. Each of his stops fed the Duke transition game and put Georgetown on the back foot in possession terms.
Georgetown's tournament run, capped by their Patriot League run earlier in the postseason, ends with the kind of result that obscures what was otherwise a strong year. The Hoyas' postseason build had been one of the steadier stories of late April and early May, but their attack never found the timing it needed against the Duke pole rotation. By halftime, the game had effectively been decided.
The Final Four bracket now sets up four programs in three configurations. Duke will meet Princeton at noon at Scott Stadium in Charlottesville, Virginia. Notre Dame and Syracuse, the other semifinal, will face off at 2:30 p.m. on the same network and the same day. The championship game is scheduled for May 25 at 1 p.m. ET on ESPN.
For Duke, the deeper context is the program's historical relationship with the Princeton fixture. The two teams' previous meetings in the bracket era have produced classics across multiple decades, and Princeton's regular-season form has positioned them as the team to beat. Duke arrives as an unseeded outsider with momentum and the kind of two-way balance — a top-15 offence married to a top-five defensive structure — that can absorb Princeton's pace if Cunningham continues to play at his current ceiling.
One week of preparation now separates the four remaining teams from May 25. Duke will arrive in Charlottesville feeling exactly like a team that has nothing to lose, because — as a No. 1-versus-unseeded matchup — that is precisely the role the bracket has handed them.
