Things Have Happened: Late Afternoon Lacrosse Updates

Let's get right to this.

• Loyola 8, Johns Hopkins 4: That'll be enough, Johns Hopkins. The Jays come up flat in its biggest moment of the season, dropping its first game in 13 tries against its Charles Street rival (for the record, I've earned two degrees in the time since Loyola last beaten Hopkins, and those seven years of learning included a year off working a job that I hated). I can't see any way that the Blue Jays get into the NCAA Tournament on the strength of merely a win over Maryland this season, and that means that the seemingly unthinkable is about to happen -- Hopkins' streak of NCAA Tournament invitations (since 1972) is about to come to a close in just over a week. The narrative that dominated the early portion of the season was whether the Jays would get back to Championship Weekend this year, enduring the longest Final Four drought in its history. I don't think anybody necessarily saw this kind of ending coming for Hopkins, but reality is a suffocating presence.
• Yale 11, Harvard 10: Attention Pennsylvania: It's time to book a trip for the home of some really good breweries. Yale did the Quakers a major solid with its win over Harvard today, eliminating the Crimson from postseason contention and extending the shelf life of a Pennsylvania team that is going to have a really interesting resume a week from now. It was a tight one early in Cambridge, the scoreboard knotted at five at the half. The Elis would use a four-goal run over the third period's first 10 minutes to build a 9-5 lead, but Harvard wouldn't quit, pulling within 9-7 with just under five minutes remaining in the penultimate period. Yale would get a goal from Conrad Oberbeck with four seconds remaining before the start of the fourth quarter to create a three-goal cushion, and the rest was an old jazz standard: Harvard's two goals over the last two minutes of play would keep things interesting, but the Bulldogs' run coming out of the half would prove too much to overcome.

As for other notable games at or approaching the half:

• Binghamton 4, UMBC 3: They're at the half in Maryland.