Twenty years? How are you not going to slip up one of those years? I mean, what are the odds?

— Syracuse head coach John Desko

What are the odds? In recent history, 100 percent. Twenty years, and the Syracuse men’s lacrosse team has advanced to the Final Four every time. It’s automatic — keyless entry into the sport’s snazziest vehicle.

Since 1983, without exception, the Orangemen cruise through the regular season, slide into the NCAA Tournament, win at least a postseason game or two and keep the record growing. Once a streak, now The Streak. Capitalization is a requisite.

It’s fitting, because in the past generation, The Streak has delivered a handsome share of reverence to Syracuse lacrosse. Powells and Gaits and Simmonses span the timeline, and so long as the names stay familiar at SU, so do the results. This season, with another team expected to challenge for the national title, SU players know their mission: add to The Streak, odds be damned.

“At Syracuse,” senior Brett Walther said, “making the Final Four isn’t guaranteed, but it almost feels like it. Going to the Final Four, that’s probably the biggest thing in the sport, and I definitely think that gets people’s attention.”

After 20 years, The Streak’s now synonymous with Syracuse lacrosse. It draws top recruits. It creates marvel. It attracts specks of national attention to a sport still a few rivers from mainstream.

But there’s a downside to The Streak. Desko believes that, sometimes, his team wears from the pressure of maintaining The Streak. In last year’s 10-9 quarterfinal victory against Duke — one of SU’s closest streak-ending calls yet — Desko remembers that his players were “more relieved than happy” to win.

“Obviously, there’s a lot of pressure,” senior defender Sol Bliss said. “If it’s not in everyone’s mind every day, it should be. I know it’s in my mind every day; it’s in my mind every game we have.”

So far, though, that hasn’t been a problem. During The Streak, the Orangemen have endured 303 games — 259 of them victories — and produced eight national championships.

As for Final Four No. 21 this season, which would, per tradition, fall on Memorial Day weekend? Desko preaches that his players must ignore the history. Just because it happened last year, he said, doesn’t mean it will automatically happen again. Each season is mutually exclusive. The Final Four isn’t a birthright.

Well, at least that’s what he’s trying to convince them.

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What are the odds? In theory, one in 29,750. Or roughly the chances of a pimp calling in sick on Mardi Gras.

Since 1983, the Orangemen have survived 23 games in which, had they lost, The Streak would’ve snapped. Most years, it’s only one game — the quarterfinal matchup. But since the NCAA incrementally expanded the lacrosse postseason from eight to 12 teams between 1985 and 1987, Syracuse failed to earn a bye and played three times in the opening round.

To arrive at the aforementioned odds, Syracuse statistics professor Pinyuen Chen recommended a model that calculated SU’s odds of winning not by the theoretical odds — 50 percent, for any one game — but rather by a percentage that figured goals for and goals against in potentially streak-ending games from the last 20 years.

“You know that their chances of winning any one game are greater that 50 percent, because they are very good,” Chen said.

In the 23 games with The Streak on the line, Syracuse outscored opponents 363-205, amassing 64 percent of all goals. For each game, therefore, Syracuse was given a 64 percent chance of winning. Winning 23 times in a row? Heck, even a two-headed quarter might land on tails once in 23.

Syracuse’s odds would be even more astronomical, if not for one willful assumption. For Chen’s equation, it’s taken for granted that SU reaching the NCAA Tournament was a 100 percent lock in each of the past 20 years. Lower that percentage to 95, and, all of a sudden, the odds of The Streak continuing grow roughly three times steeper, from one in 29,750 to one in 96,792.

And, Chen admits, “there are other factors involved, too: where the game is being played, who’s injured, maybe the weather and the atmosphere. Not everything can be accounted for.”

He’s right. And there’s no real point of comparison. Fellow lacrosse power Johns Hopkins has advanced to the NCAA Tournament every year since 1972, but the Blue Jays failed to reach the Final Four several times, including in 2001. In women’s soccer, North Carolina now owns a streak of 22 consecutive Final Fours, but that remains the only similar run in college sports.

“The only thing is, statistically, you wonder how much longer you can keep the record going,” said former Syracuse lacrosse head coach Roy Simmons Jr., who retired in 1998. “I don’t think it’s a record that will ever be equaled in our sport.”

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What are the odds? In reality, who knows.

Some view The Streak with skepticism because, they say, a relatively small number of schools compete in lacrosse. For the 2003 season, 54 Division I teams will field teams, and of that collection, only six other than Syracuse have won a title.

“You take the number of teams playing,” Desko said. “I think that would tend to dilute the importance of it.”

Still, Simmons — who took over at Syracuse when his father retired in 1970 — believes the sport’s top-heavy structure shouldn’t diminish The Streak.

Nobody complained about lack of competition, after all, in last year’s pulse-pounder against Duke. Or in the 1984 overtime win against Rutgers. Or in the 1998 come-from-behind win against Virginia, when Syracuse needed five unanswered goals in the fourth quarter to advance.

“There were situations when the clock was ticking down and we were down a goal or two, and for once, it seemed like we wouldn’t advance,” Simmons said. “But we’d always dig ourselves out of it.”

Simmons and Desko allow that The Streak creates higher expectations at Syracuse. Yes, it burdens the Orangemen with “a history of expectations,” as Bliss said. Yet it also sets an automatic goal for every season.

“(The Streak) grew to be a focus,” Simmons said. “It got to be the carrot. A lot of teams just hope to win 50 percent of their games or get a big win or just get a respectable season. But when we start, we say, ‘We are lacrosse history.’ Our ultimate goal will be on the field Memorial Day weekend.”

Said Bliss: “We always want to continue that streak and continue that tradition and keep playing for all the players who helped build it.”

With every return visit to the Final Four, though, The Streak is less likely to continue. Syracuse hasn’t slipped in 20 years, and Bliss doesn’t want this year’s group to be the first.

He doesn’t want to be That Team. Somehow, those capital letters don’t have quite the same grandeur.

Published on February 24, 2003 at 12:00 pm