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PHILADELPHIA — There wasn’t much going through Michael Leo’s head, believe it or not.

Not even 20 minutes ago, he was standing on the right wing, watching Luke Rhoa dodge his way around the net. He was raising his stick as high as he could, plucking Rhoa’s errant pass out of the air. He was hitting a jabstep, getting Penn’s Anthony McMullan to fall for the hesi as he made his way to the goal. He was releasing the ball past the outstretched arms of Quakers defender Matthew Till, watching as it just barely bounced through goalie Jack Pelot’s legs.

He was running around like a madman, both his arms outstretched as if to say, “Who wants it?” while his teammates chased him, desperately trying to get their hands on the hero of the afternoon.

So please forgive him if, right now, sitting in a chair inside Franklin Field, he can’t exactly articulate the inner workings of his mind in the immediate aftermath of his game-winning goal. You want him to give it a go? Fine. Here it is, raw and unfiltered, exactly what his synapses fired off as soon as he watched the ball enter the net.

We won.

Astute analysis, Leo. It’s almost difficult to believe it with how the last two hours had gone, but yes, you won. Somehow, some way, No. 6 Syracuse (4-2, Atlantic Coast) miraculously escaped Franklin Field with a 9-8 overtime victory over No. 19 Penn (2-3, Ivy League) Sunday afternoon. The Orange were death-defyingly close to their third consecutive loss, the kind of defeat that would jeopardize a team’s playoff hopes. With one shot, Leo dragged SU back from the dead.

“The guys stuck together, even when it wasn’t going well,” SU head coach Gary Gait said. “I give my coaches, my players a lot of credit for not quitting and not giving up.”

The Orange had every reason to give up. With 19 minutes and 14 seconds left in regulation, SU was reeling down 8-4, its season hanging in the balance. In all fairness, it’s only March 1, and championships are won in May.

After trailing by four in the third quarter, Syracuse averted a three-game losing run with a 9-8 overtime win over Penn Sunday. Eli Schwartz | Asst. Photo Editor

But to even get to May to begin with, teams have to take care of business in March, and Syracuse hasn’t displayed any sort of ability to do so over its last three contests.

Take Harvard, for example, a game where SU led 12-10 late and gave up three unanswered goals to the Crimson for its first defeat of the season. Princeton, an even better example, a game where the Orange never looked comfortable offensively and Joey Spallina was held without a point for the third time in his Syracuse career.

“We didn’t execute,” Gait said after that loss. “We just didn’t move the ball.”

With how SU was looking through the first 41 minutes of Sunday’s contest, it was seemingly time for a referendum on its ability to perform against high-level opponents. Technically speaking, Lacrosse Reference projects the Orange could finish 8-8 and still have a decent chance at making the NCAA Tournament, just by virtue of how difficult their schedule is.

But just making the NCAA Tournament isn’t the bar that this SU squad has set for itself. Ask Spallina what he’s looking to accomplish, he’ll give it to you straight. Riley Figueiras? Same deal. This is the last year the hallowed 2022 class will share the field together at Syracuse, and after last year’s Final Four run, the expectation is nothing short of a championship.

Losing three straight — with one of those losses against the 19th-best team in the country — is simply not what championship contenders do. They find ways to win, by all means, when the going gets tough.

That’s what the Orange did Sunday.

“It’s not always gonna be pretty,” Syracuse goalie Jimmy McCool said postgame. “But you gotta find a way to win, and I think that was a good example of that today.”

It didn’t always appear that Leo’s heroics were going to be necessary Sunday. The Orange drew first blood with Finn Thomson’s first goal, then regained a 2-1 lead on Greg Elijah-Brown’s man-up goal, and found another 4-3 lead in the second quarter with a Ted Rawson tally — also a man-up goal, funnily enough.

But those scores belied the struggles that befell the Orange throughout the game’s first three quarters. John Mullen just couldn’t win faceoffs, an issue that afflicted him in SU’s previous two contests, and Syracuse’s offense suffered as a result. The faceoff man finished the first half winning just one of his first seven faceoffs, and his only faceoff win — if you really want to call it that — was a clash he nearly lost before the ball managed to scoot its way to Chuck Kuczynski.

“I don’t know if there’s anything that we were doing differently,” Penn head coach Taylor Wray said. “I think we just matched up well against him.”

Syracuse’s Michael Leo scored the game-winner 36 seconds into overtime Sunday, completing the Orange’s furious comeback. Eli Schwartz | Asst. Photo Editor

Those lost possessions contributed to the 24-15 first-half shot disparity SU faced, and even when Syracuse did get the ball, it just couldn’t score at even strength. The Quakers went into the break up 5-4, and three of the Orange’s four first-half goals came on man-up possessions.

And, coming out of the half, Penn didn’t have nearly as much issue getting on the board. First it was Ben Beacham, rifling one past McCool to make it 6-4. Then it was Davis Provost, tacking on another to make it 7-4. Then it was Jackson Maher, grabbing the feed from Griffin Scane to put an eighth Quaker goal on the board.

But then, somewhere along the way, the wheels began to fall off. Wray couldn’t exactly pinpoint where the tide turned — whether it was Spallina’s goal to make it 8-5, Thomson’s brace to make it 8-7, or Dwan’s pole goal to make it 8-8 — but there was undoubtedly a momentum shift.

“In games like that, you know that the other team is gonna make a run,” Wray said. “They won a couple of faceoffs in the fourth quarter, cut it to one, next thing you know, you’re right in it.”

The Orange have an embarrassment of riches at their disposal, really. It’s why they can afford to go down at times, because when it comes down to it, somebody, somewhere is going to make a play when it counts. It might not have been Spallina in SU’s final regulation possession, when he turned the ball over to send the game to overtime.

But it’s OK. That’s why Leo’s there, the necromancer, dodging around McMullan to resurrect Syracuse’s season with a shot. The hard part’s over. Leo knows what he has to do now.

Just run.

Published on March 1, 2026 at 2:33 pm
Contact Mauricio: mjpalmar@syr.edu | @mpalmarDO