The Syracuse Orange’s 2026 season came to an end on Saturday with a 15-7 loss to Notre Dame in the Final Four, the second consecutive year they’ve gotten blown out in the national semifinals.
It was a game in which ‘Cuse was chasing right from the start, never leading and never even tying the score as the Irish went wire-to-wire for the win.
In an odd quirk, the offense scored six of their seven goals in very small pockets of time, split up into two separate three-goal mini runs that spanned a total
of just over four minutes of clock. Both runs helped get SU back into the game at the time, but both times, ND re-gained control and re-extend the lead, eventually running away with it.
The back-breaker came after the Orange’s second 3-0 spurt late in the third quarter, which took a 9-4 game that was about to get out of control into a 9-7 deficit with momentum that briefly had ‘Cuse feeling like they could make a run at it in the fourth.
With less than 20 seconds in the third and two seconds on the shot clock, freshman Louis D’Agostino committed a cross check to the neck of Notre Dame’s Matt Jeffery. The play was given a two-minute non-releasable penalty, and SU was forced down a player for most of the first two minutes of the fourth quarter.
The penalty proved to be devastating, as the Irish scored three goals before it was released, restored their five-goal advantage, and kicked off a six-goal fourth quarter run to end the game and Syracuse’s season with a punishing blow.
In so many ways, the sequence was representative of ‘Cuse’s 2026 season, a campaign that was defined by a team with talent to match anybody but an unstoppable tendency to self-destruct in big moments against big competition.
They did it again on Saturday. There were no guarantees about the Orange making a comeback against a very good Notre Dame team that had spent most of the afternoon in control, but they put themselves in position to give it a go at 9-7 late in the third. But before they could even get to the fourth, a back-breaking penalty on a hit that was late and in a dangerous area took them out of it.
It was one of countless bad penalties, sloppy turnovers and careless plays that defined this as an undisciplined team that was very often their own worst enemy.
But it was more than simply committing bad penalties that did the Orange in on this day. The true killer was the specialty situations. ‘Cuse wasn’t alone in making mistakes in this game. Both SU and Notre Dame finished with five penalties, and the Irish actually committed both a two-minute and one-minute non-releasable. But ND scored five goals on the man-up, including three on ‘Cuse’s two-minute penalty. The Orange, meanwhile, went 0-for-5 on EMO and also gave up a man-down goal to the Irish at the tail end of their two-minute infraction.
The mistakes were bad, but Notre Dame took Syracuse’s lunch money and left them with nothing on both their man-up and man-down units.
Only four players scored a point for an Orange offense that found small, specific pockets of success but were ultimately shut down by the Irish’s stout defense, Thomas Ricciardelli’s 14 saves and an absolutely awful shooting day.
Finn Thomson led the way with four goals in the final game of his ‘Cuse career. Finn had an excellent shooting day, but unfortunately he was alone in that regard. The slick finisher shot 4-of-5 for the game, while the rest of the team shot an almost-unthinkable 3-of-40, which is 7.5 percent.
Luke Rhoa took 14 of those shots and scored on two of them while adding an assist for three points in his final game, while Payton Anderson had a goal and two assists. Joey Spallina rounded out the four players who scored with a pair of assists to close out his career as Shawn Lyght held him to a pretty low impact on the day.
Johnny Mullen had another good day, going 14-for-24 and not missing a single face-off despite getting hurt and hopping off the field at one point early in the game.
Jimmy McCool had a rough day in net with 11 saves and a .423 save percentage, although his defense wasn’t providing a ton of help. Given how these two teams matched-up, the Orange needed Jimmy to come up large if they were going to have a chance to pull the win, but it just wasn’t his day for that.
Notre Dame controlled the game from the outset by scoring the first four goals to jump out to a 4-0 lead about 12 minutes into the game.
‘Cuse’s first scoring spurt came late in the first, however, as they punched back with three straight goals, all in the final two minutes of the opening quarter. Spallina threw a pass that, intentionally or not, threaded all the way to the backside of the crease for a wide-open finish from Finn. The second and third goals were the product of Bear initiating with effective dodging that drew the defense’s attention and allowed for some effective ball movement to create open looks that were finished by Finn and then Rhoa to make it 4-3 ND.
In that moment, it looked like the Orange had figured out how they wanted to attack the Irish in this game, by using Bear and Wyatt Hottle to invert and dodge their short-stick matchups as a way of kick-starting movement to generate scoring chances. But the moment was nothing more than a flurry, as ND controlled the second quarter with the exception of one very nice inside pass from Bear to Finn for a backhanded shovel goal in the middle of the quarter. The Irish won the quarter, 3-1, to take a 7-4 lead into the halftime break.
They continued their momentum into the third, where they scored the first two goals, the second of which came less than a minute after a Michael Leo goal was disallowed when Finn made his own mistake by accidentally stepping in the crease before the goal was scored.
The Irish made it 9-4 a little more than halfway through the third, and looked to be putting an early end to the game. But the Orange had one final run in them with their second 3-0 run of the afternoon late in the third. Spallina found Finn for the second time to start, followed by a nice shortie dodge from X by Luke Rhoa that he turned into a roll-back dodge and a bouncer around Ricciardelli.
Bear scored the third with a beautiful individual effort in which he took a pass on the high wing, put his defender in the spin cycle, followed it with a swim move towards the middle and fired a laser beam with high right hand into the top right corner for a juice goal that completed the 3-0 run and made it 9-7 with 1:39 on the clock in the third.
It felt big in the moment, like ‘Cuse was making one last run at a comeback, but it ended abruptly a little more than minute later when D’Agostino committed the non-releasable penalty. The Irish made him and the Orange pay for it with three goals on the man-up and a 6-0 fourth quarter to close the game and take it from a 9-7 score to a 15-7 blowout exit from Memorial Day weekend.
‘Cuse finishes the season 13-6 with their second straight Final Four loss.
