POUGHKEEPSIE, N.Y. — The No. 6 Quinnipiac men’s lacrosse team’s season came to a disastrous end Saturday with a record-setting 29-19 loss to No. 3 Marist in the first round of the MAAC tournament.

The Bobcats’ double-digit loss was emblematic of the team’s 7-7 season: all over the place. 

“It was an up and down year,” head coach Mason Poli said. “We had weeks where we weren’t ready to go out of the gate, similar to today.”

Marist graduate attacks Jamison Embury and Jojo Pirreca put the Red Foxes up three within the first 58 seconds of play. When sophomore attack Jake Deacy netted a third less than two minutes later, it set the tone for a long, ugly night in the rain at Tenney Stadium.

A goal from Quinnipiac freshman long-stick midfielder Ryan Downing 23 seconds later seemed to give the Bobcats a glimmer of hope. 

As each team scored back-and-forth, Quinnipiac managed to tie the game twice — once at four, and then again at five.

But the game quickly fell apart from there. By the end of the first quarter, the Red Foxes — outshooting the Bobcats 11-6 — were up 7-6.

And it only got worse in the second quarter. The Red Foxes scored five unanswered goals in under eight minutes before Quinnipiac junior midfielder Trevor Douglas finally found the back of the net following a Marist slashing penalty.

Douglas, senior attack Jake Tellers, junior attack Dylan Donnery and junior midfielder Evan Perry netted another four in the final three-and-a-half minutes of the first half, but two Marist goals before halftime kept the Red Foxes up 14-11. 

Although Perry and Donnery combined to score another three goals in the third quarter, Marist’s unrelenting offense scored five. With 15 minutes to play, the Red Foxes had outscored the Bobcats 19-14.

Pirreca and Douglas traded goals early in the final quarter, bringing the score to 20-15. However, the Red Foxes quickly found themselves up by 13 after an eight-minute, eight-goal rampage in the middle of the fourth quarter brought the score to a nauseating 28-15.

Four Bobcats scored in the final two minutes of play to bring Quinnipiac within nine, but Pirreca’s sixth tally of the night finalized the 48-goal game at 29-19. 

The Red Foxes — who dropped a tight 14-12 game in Hamden less than five weeks prior — set not only a school record but a MAAC men’s lacrosse tournament record for most goals scored in a single game.

“It’s hard,” said Tellers, who announced he will be returning for his fifth season next year. “It’s a bad loss … but a lot of guys are excited to come back next year and get after it.”

Quinnipiac’s game, Poli said, was a “tale of two ends.” 

“Offensively, I thought we did a lot of good things,” the nine-year veteran coach said. “Just didn’t quite possess the ball enough and then make enough stops defensively to take control of the game.”

In total, four Bobcats — Donnery, Tellers, Douglas and senior attack John DeLucia — scored hat tricks, with Perry netting four.  Junior midfielder Steven Germain led the team in points with five assists and one goal.

Committing only two penalties next to Marist’s seven, Quinnipiac also played a relatively clean game. The Bobcats tended to play well in man-up situations, scoring on four of the Red Foxes’ penalties.

But the Bobcats ultimately lost on turnovers and face-off losses. The Red Foxes overwhelmed Quinnipiac at the face-off more than 60% of the time, and the Bobcats committed a series of ugly turnovers that often led directly to Marist goals.

The Bobcats’ playoff loss was still a welcome shift from the team’s 2-11 performance last season. And despite being a little — and sometimes a lot — all over the place, Poli summed up the 2023 season as a “bounce-back year.”

“To get to .500 this year — finish 7-7 — was a step forward for us,” Poli said. “So, we take all those things, we hold on to today and let this motivate us this summer.”