Denver certainly took a dent in its armor over the weekend when the Outlaws fell to the Chicago Machine in a 13-16 loss. Rookies Stephen Brooks and Mike Leveille combined for 7 of those 16; Brooks scored the only two-point goal in the game as well. As for Denver, the Outlaws fell despite Drew Westervelt’s four goals.

In a perfect world, the face-off X would be a place where rules are followed and every draw is done cleanly. But in reality, that's not the case. It’s a place where two individuals will scratch and claw, doing whatever it takes to get the ball for their team.

Chris Eck recently graduated from Colgate as top faceoff specialist in program history.

In 2008, he started all 17 games for the Raiders and won 199 out of 327 face offs for an outstanding .609 winning percentage. Eck was a first-team All-Patriot League selection, leading the Raiders to a Patriot League Championship, their first NCAA tournament appearance, and a top 10 National ranking.

Now that we’re already two weeks into the season and post-draft, it’s a good time to take a look at what’s going on around the MLL. There were some interesting happenings at the draft that are worth a thought — particularly Chicago’s draft results. I’ll also throw out a few comments on the season thus far and prospects for the ten MLL teams out there.

The 2008 season had a bit of a surprise ending--Syracuse winning it all--and that is great for the sport.

It is also great for lacrosse that Foxborough drew record crowds for the weekend as a whole. I am sure a lot of the fans that made it to Foxborough this past weekend overlap with the fans that made the Championship games in Baltimore and Philadelphia in the past, but it is for the fans that do not overlap that moving the games helps. Reaching more and more fans every year is what the game needs.

Foxborough Massachusetts--No one, except the LAXnews readers, saw this one coming.

Looking at Championship weekend, there were one or two scripts that seemed ready to happen. There was the Duke story that everyone talked about: A group of 5th year seniors coming back from the scandal of '06 and brutal one goal losses to Hopkins in the '05 and '07 Championships to win it all.

Foxborough Massachusetts--In the Division Two Championship today, a matchup between powerhouses, NY Tech downed LeMoyne 16-11. Led by attackman Keith Henderson (5g), midfielder Matt Messina (2g, 3a), and goalie Chris Powers (11 saves), the Bears played an up-paced game providing ample offense to go with a superb defensive effort.

A record crowd of 24,317 witnessed the action.

Foxborough Massachusetts--Coming into the Division 3 Championship game, the question facing the defending Champs was if they could win without their first and second string goalies. A couple weeks prior to the game, an off-field incident led to the suspensions of Salisbury goalies Riley Clark and Zach Krissoff and without the two, who had logged the majority of minutes all season, Salisbury was left to go with Nick Fiorentino between the pipes.

My sincere apologies to the Johns Hopkins Blue Jays. I did not mean any disrespect to them when I wrote in this column last week that Duke would play Syracuse in the Championship game.

I thought there was no way that Duke could lose with as good as their attack is and with how well the whole team was playing this season...

...but the fact is that they did lose to Hopkins and the fact is that the Blue Jays do deserve to be in the Final on Monday.

Foxborough Massachusetts--In the middle of the third quarter, Duke showed the kind of team they were — scoring three goals in a matter of seconds. Fortunately, the Blue Jays prevented them from being that team for the rest of the game.

Thanks to slow, methodical and poised play, the Blue Jays managed to control possessions and prevent Duke from capitalizing on too many transition opportunities en route to a 10-9 victory.

Foxborough Massachusetts--Overtime is a new game, and no one knows that better now than goalies Bud Petit and John Galloway.

Despite Petit’s 13 saves in regulation — compared to Galloway’s seven — and his picked passes and saves in overtime, it was Syracuse that came away with the win off of senior attackman Mike Leveille’s stick in double-overtime.

Unlike in the last two seasons, the 2008 Lacrosse Final Four does not feature a Cinderella story. All of the teams going to Foxboro are well established programs that have been there before.

Duke is going to the Championship game, and they are going to win it. Mark my words.

Rich Donovan—a former college coach and a frequent contributor to the LAXnews site—shares some thoughts on the '08 NCAA Tourney.

The regular season is over. The 16 NCAA tournament teams have been selected. The games that really mean something are about to begin.