Johns Hopkins and Notre Dame will meet in the NCAA quarterfinals at 12 pm Saturday at Hofstra, with a trip to the final four on the line and a familiar rivalry back in the bracket. The winner advances to the NCAA semifinals at the University of Virginia on Saturday, May 23, and will face the winner of North Carolina-Syracuse.
Johns Hopkins enters at 10-5 after edging sixth-ranked Cornell 9-8 in overtime on May 9 to reach this round. Notre Dame arrives at 11-2 after beating Jacksonville 18-5 at home on May 10, a result that kept the Irish on track for another deep postseason run.
This is the eighth meeting between the programs in men's lacrosse, and all seven previous games came in the NCAA Tournament. Their most recent matchup was in the 2023 quarterfinals, and Johns Hopkins has won four of the seven postseason meetings, which gives this one a history that is bigger than the records beside each team’s name.
The numbers around Johns Hopkins still frame the scale of the task. The Blue Jays are ranked ninth in both the USILA Coaches Poll and the KANE Inside Lacrosse Media Poll, while Notre Dame is second in the USILA Poll and third in the KANE poll. Hopkins is in its 139th season, dating to 1883, and owns a 1,043-388-15 all-time mark. It remains the only men's lacrosse program with 1,000 or more victories, reaching that level with an 11-10 win over Loyola on February 19, 2022.
There is also a date attached to this game that carries its own weight. Since 1950, Saturday’s meeting will be just the sixth Johns Hopkins game played on May 16, and the Blue Jays are 4-1 on that date. Three of those wins came in the NCAA Tournament in 1979, 1984 and 1992, a reminder that the calendar has occasionally lined up with Hopkins’ deepest spring runs.
The tension in this matchup is simple: Notre Dame brings the higher ranking and the stronger record, while Johns Hopkins brings the postseason history and a habit of turning national championship weekends into its own territory. Since the NCAA began sponsoring the championship in 1971, Hopkins has played the defending national champion 49 times, gone 24-25 in those games and 8-6 in NCAA Tournament meetings with the titleholder. It has eliminated the defending champion in the tournament in 1973, 1974, 1978, 1983, 1984, 1987, 2003 and 2026, a list that helps explain why even a quarterfinal can feel like a stage with an old script attached.
For Notre Dame, the task is to turn a strong seed into a clean path. For Johns Hopkins, it is another chance to prove that a program with 44 national championships, including nine NCAA titles, can still make a season bend to its own history when the bracket tightens in May.
