Quarterfinals Was the Ceiling After All
A follow-up to last week’s column on Johns Hopkins lacrosse, written from the parking lot of James M. Shuart Stadium.
Notre Dame 15, Johns Hopkins 9.
The Blue Jays played the second-seeded Fighting Irish even for thirty minutes Saturday afternoon at Hofstra and got outscored 9-3 in the next thirty. They finished the season 10-6. They did not reach the Final Four. Peter Milliman, now six seasons into the job, still has not coached Johns Hopkins to a national semifinal. The program’s Final Four drought is now twelve years.
Last week in this space, I asked whether a feel-good first-round upset of defending champion Cornell was still the standard at Johns Hopkins or had become the ceiling.
Saturday answered the question.
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The game
For two quarters, Hopkins looked like a team that belonged. The Blue Jays took an early 3-2 lead. They weathered a Notre Dame response. The score was 6-6 at halftime and Hopkins had managed to keep the Irish offense, the highest-scoring unit left in the bracket, from finding rhythm.
Whatever Kevin Corrigan said to his team in the locker room worked. Notre Dame opened the third quarter on a 3-0 run and never trailed again. Graduate student Josh Yago put up seven points, four goals and three assists, tied for the second-highest point total in an NCAA tournament game in Notre Dame history. Matt Jeffery added five points on two goals and three assists. Luke Miller scored twice. Eight different Irish players found the net. Five had multi-goal games.
On the other end, Notre Dame’s defense, anchored by Tewaaraton finalist Shawn Lyght and senior goalie Thomas Ricciardelli, held Hopkins to 26 total shots over four quarters. Oran Gelinas kept the Blue Jays in it as long as he could in goal, including a tremendous save midway through the fourth that briefly resurrected the upset bid. But the Hopkins offense, which had managed to grind down Cornell a week earlier, never found a second-half rhythm. Three goals in the fourth quarter, by which point the deficit had ballooned beyond reach.
The loss evened the all-time series at 4-4, with Notre Dame having now taken three straight, all in the NCAA tournament. For Hopkins, it was the third quarterfinal exit of the Milliman era and the second consecutive postseason in which the Blue Jays were the last team out of the Final Four conversation.
The thing about losing 15-9 to Notre Dame
It isn’t shocking. It isn’t even disappointing in any precise sense. It is what should happen when a 10-5 program plays a 12-2 program with better players, more depth, and a defense that has been the best in the country for two years running. Notre Dame is the program Johns Hopkins used to be. The Irish have now been to three Final Fours in four years. They won back-to-back national titles in 2023 and 2024. They built that under Kevin Corrigan, who has been at South Bend since 1988, the kind of generational continuity Hopkins used to enjoy and chose to walk away from in April 2020.
Which brings us back to the question last week’s column was asking, and to one piece of the institutional picture I left out of it.a
The thing I should have included last time
When Tom Calder stepped down as Hopkins’ AD in 2016 after 21 years, a run that included the 2005 and 2007 national championships and the 2008 title game, the university ran a formal national search with a publicly named committee. Alanna Shanahan, the deputy AD at Penn, emerged as the external hire and thanked the committee by name in her announcement.
Three years later, Shanahan was promoted to Vice Provost. Jennifer Baker, Shanahan’s own hire from two years earlier into a position created specifically for her, was elevated to athletic director in the same announcement. No search was disclosed. No national pool. No committee thanked. No external candidates named.
Eight months later, Baker parted with Pietramala. Two weeks after that, she hired Milliman from Cornell, where she had spent three years before coming to Hopkins.
The last time the institution ran a proper search for AD, it was coming off the most successful lacrosse era in modern program history.
The next time it filled the same job, there was no search to speak of. The coach who has presided over the worst stretch of Hopkins lacrosse in living memory was hired by the AD who got her own job through that process. This contrast is worth holding in mind.
The numbers, updated through Saturday
| Pietramala (2001-2020) | Milliman (2021-2026) | |
|---|---|---|
| Seasons | 20 | 6 |
| Overall record | 207-93 | 49-43 |
| Winning percentage | .690 | .533 |
| Wins per season | 10.4 | 8.2 |
| NCAA tournament appearances | 18 of 20 | 4 of 6 |
| Final Fours | 7 | 0 |
| National title game appearances | 4 | 0 |
| National championships | 2 | 0 |
| Conference tournament titles | 2 | 0 |
A 16-point winning percentage gap. Zero national semifinals in six years against seven in twenty for the man fired for not winning enough. One missed tournament in 2021. One historically bad season in 2025. And a 2026 campaign that, stripped of the Cornell game for one second, was a 10-6 quarterfinal team that lost its conference title game and got outscored by six in the round of eight.
What this season actually was
The Cornell win, in retrospect, looks exactly like what skeptics warned it might be. A single good Saturday in a season that mostly was not one. Hopkins went 9-5 in the regular season, lost its Big Ten title game, beat a Cornell team that turned out to be the seventh seed for a reason, and then got handled by the actual best teams left in the bracket. That is not a renaissance. That is a quarterfinal program, which is the same thing this program has been, on its best years, for most of a decade.
The case for patience is exhausted. The case that the sport has gotten harder applies equally to Notre Dame, Maryland, Virginia, Cornell, and Princeton, all of whom have figured out how to reach Championship Weekend in the same window during which Hopkins has not. The case that 2025 was an outlier was undercut by a 2026 that, the Cornell game aside, looked an awful lot like 2025 against anyone with a pulse.
So what now
The question that started last week’s column is now closed. The standard at Johns Hopkins lacrosse has been redefined downward. Six seasons of evidence and one quarterfinal exit on Saturday made that official.
What remains is what the institution intends to do about it. The athletic director who made the call to part with Pietramala and hired Milliman is the same athletic director the program promoted without a national search, and she is the person who will decide whether Milliman gets a seventh season, an eighth, a contract extension, or a parting of ways like the one she presided over six years ago. There is no senior administrator above her in the org chart whose professional formation in college athletics did not happen at Hopkins, Penn, or Cornell. The people who built this version of Johns Hopkins lacrosse are the people who will evaluate it.
Calder hired Pietramala in 2001 and got two national championships out of the relationship. Shanahan inherited Pietramala and kept him. Baker hired Milliman and has now extended his contract once, in 2023, after his best season, which was a quarterfinal exit.
If the standard is quarterfinals, the people running the program should say so out loud. If the standard is championships, they should explain how the current arrangement gets them there. And if there is some answer between the two, the alumni base and the donor base who keep the lights on at Cordish are entitled to hear what it is.
The banners still hang. The dynasty is now nineteen years gone. At some point that stops being a coaching transition and starts being an identity.
Hopkins should decide which one it is.
