A Championship For Zach Currier

The first thing that Zach Currier did to stand out during the Major League Lacrosse championship game Saturday night was to wear black socks and black cleats.

The second thing he did to stand out was play the way only Currier can.

Okay, there was another member of the Denver Outlaws who wore the same socks and cleats. There's nobody else anywhere who can play the way Currier does.

Matt Kavanagh, a Notre Dame grad, was the MVP as the Outlaws defeated Dallas 16-12 to win their third title in five years. Kavanagh was the logical choice, as he had four goals and five assists.

Without Currier, though, Denver would never have won its latest championship. Currier had four goals and nine ground balls in the 13-12 semifinal win over Chesapeake, and he came back in the final with two goals (including the first of the game) and an assist (a spectacular feed to Kavanagh as he was falling forward), not to mention everything else he does.

Basically, Currier is a tornado that overtakes a game and imposes his will on everything that happens. He is relentless, taking nothing for granted ever. He never stops hustling, and no loose ball is ever safe.

He throws himself into every scrum on the field, and more often than not he comes out with possession. He also takes an extraordinary amount of punishment, none of which seems to slow him down.

If you watched the game Saturday night, you saw classic Currier. He played both sides of the field, and he was a total nuisance to every move Dallas tried to make.

He made a ton of plays to disrupt Dallas possessions, and even the ones that didn't result in turnovers still slowed the Rattlers offense to a crawl. A game that was 9-6 Dallas midway through the second quarter saw Denver go on a 10-3 run to finish things out, and Currier was as responsible for that as anyway, as Dallas had so few settled 6 on 6 possessions after halftime.

As Denver tried to salt away the game, repeatedly the ball in Currier's stick, behind the goal, despite the fact that he's a midfielder. What happened to seal it? He drew a penalty while getting whacked at by the Dallas defense, one that basically ended the game. 

It actually made TigerBlog think about the end of the recent World Championship final, where Currier and Canada lost 9-8 to the U.S. on a goal by another Princeton alum, Tom Schreiber, with one second left.

Currier seemed to get Canada possession after a face-off with less than four minutes to go, but the now-famous offsides call awarded the ball back to the Americans, who possessed it until Schreiber's game-winner. Watching the end of the MLL final, TB couldn't help but think what would have happened if Canada hadn't been burned by that call.

The ball would have spent a lot of time in Currier's stick, and Canada probably would never have given it up.

It's because of that loss that TigerBlog really, really wanted Denver to win the championship. Well, that, and Currier was the only Princeton alum in the game.

Schreiber defeated Currier last summer in the MLL final, when the Ohio Machine defeated the Outlaws. Then there was the excruciating World Championship loss.

Currier deserved one.

And he was as big a reason as anyone why his team won.

In the nearly 30 years that TigerBlog has been covering Princeton Athletics, he has never seen any athlete robbed more of an individual honor than Currier was of being a first-team All-America his senior year of 2017. It was a complete joke.

By the way, Scott Bacigalupo as a second-team All-Ivy pick in 1994 is a close second, though Bacigalupo made up for it by being the national Player of the Year. TB thought he'd never seen anyone get more jobbed than that, and he didn't for 23 years.

Anyway, which of the four players who were first-team selections that year should have been second-team instead of Currier? All of them.

Currier as a senior had 24 goals, 34 assists and 130 ground balls. He led the team in caused turnovers, and he won 57 percent of his face-offs. No midfielder will ever match those numbers.

Because of that slight, TB is happy that Currier is getting his due as a pro. He was a first-round in both the indoor and outdoor leagues, and he has been an all-star in both his MLL seasons (the indoor National Lacrosse League doesn't have an all-star game).

Paul Carcaterra on the ESPN broadcast Saturday night referred to Currier as "a top five player in Major League Lacrosse." He's right.

There's no player that TigerBlog has ever seen, at Princeton or anywhere else, who plays the way Currier does and can do all the things he can do. At times he looks like he's gliding nonchalantly, but the ferocity never leaves anything he's doing.

And now he has a championship. Maybe it wasn't the one he would have preferred to have this summer, but this one is pretty special too.

And it never would have happened without what he, and only he, does on a lacrosse field.