Think of this: in 1992, the Boston College women’s lacrosse program began, under the cloud of three possible closures of women’s lacrosse programs at Massachusetts, Northeastern, and Rutgers.
Today, the Eagles stand as champions of the Atlantic Coast Conference, a league of women’s lacrosse teams which could conceivably go five deep in this year’s NCAA Division I Tournament.
The Eagles, along with second-place North Carolina, regular-season champion Syracuse, along with Virginia and Notre Dame, are, for me, absolute locks for the tournament. You could also make a case for first-year program Clemson, despite the fact that the Tigers do not have a significant win over a Top 10 team.
Still, the ACC this year is a good story. With other conferences like the Big Ten and Big East making great strides in interconference play, the margin for error for this coming week is narrower than ever. It will be very difficult for many teams playing this week to make the tournament without winning the conference championship.
Indeed, it has gotten to the point where Princeton, in its final league fixture of the 2023 campaign, knew it needed to beat Harvard by at least four goals in order to clinch the third seed and an Ivy semifinal match against Yale. The Elis, Princeton, and Harvard all finished with 4-3 league records, though Princeton’s record is under .500, meaning the Tigers need to win the Ivy League postseason tournament to even be eligible for the NCAA Tournament.
Filling the brackets for this year is going to be very interesting and unlikely to be a clean exercise.
TopOfTheCircle.com 
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