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Maryland, North Carolina square off for NCAA men's lacrosse crown

At Thursday's championship weekend banquet at the Franklin Institute, Maryland attack Matt Rambo spent the night talking with North Carolina defenseman Austin Pifani. Tar Heels coach Joe Breschi said the two friends reminisced about the good old days, those formative years they spent as teammates at Abington Lacrosse Club.

At Thursday's championship weekend banquet at the Franklin Institute, Maryland attack Matt Rambo spent the night talking with North Carolina defenseman Austin Pifani. Tar Heels coach Joe Breschi said the two friends reminisced about the good old days, those formative years they spent as teammates at Abington Lacrosse Club.

Rambo wasn't conversing with the enemy just yet. At the time, the Terrapins were focused on semifinal opponent Brown as Carolina looked to Loyola.

But after winning in the semifinals Saturday, the childhood best friends will face off Monday in the NCAA Division I championship at Lincoln Financial Field.

The teams are familiar with each other, having last played on March 26. That matchup ended in an 11-8 Maryland victory in which Rambo scored four goals. Breschi talked to Rambo about that performance at the banquet.

"I said, 'You looked over at me after you scored your fourth goal,' " Breschi said. "And he said, 'Yeah, I was wondering when you were going to start doubling me.' "

That conversation was all in good fun, Breschi said, granted that UNC tried to recruit Rambo.

Despite the teams' familiarity with each other, they enter the championship under vastly different circumstances.

Maryland (17-2) enters as a top seed, led by Rambo and Colin Heacock, both of whom logged 40 goals this season. But as the Terps proved in their 15-14 overtime win over Brown, the team is full of offensive threats.

"I think if we have a chance to win on Monday . . . it's going to have to be scoring from a lot of different guys," Maryland coach John Tillman said.

Carolina (11-6) started its season 3-3 and entered the tournament unseeded.

"It's one of those things where maybe in the past the teams have been under a little bit more pressure with higher seeds," Breschi said. "I think we were all kind of a little bit nervous about the selection show. . . . We weren't sure if we were going to get in."

Steve Pontrello, a St. Augustine Prep grad, leads the Tar Heels with 47 goals and has recorded 20 assists.

Heading into Monday, Breschi called Carolina the underdog. But Tillman indicated Maryland isn't so sure about that.

"They're deep all the way across the board," Breschi said of Maryland. "So they're the number one team in the country and we're just the unseeded group that's here crashing the party."

"I don't know who's hotter right now. You might say that they're the favorite," Tillman said. "Now we've got to figure out, given all the goals we gave up [Saturday]: Can we stop them?"

emccarthy@phillynews.com

@ErinMcPSU