For Loyola Lacrosse, the Sprint Is Over Loyola head coach Charley Toomey choked up during his on-field interview just seconds after the Greyhounds won their first national championship in school history with a 9-3 win over Maryland on Monday. And with good reason. Twenty-two years after Toomey was in net for Loyola when they were trounced, 21-9, by Syracuse in the title game, the seventh-year head coach brought his alma mater something it had never achieved in its 160-year history: a national championship at the Division I level. "Thought Saturday was a pretty cool day for the Greyhounds," Toomey said of the semifinal victory against Notre Dame. Today is special. The national championship was a long time coming for the small, Jesuit university in northern Baltimore. Loyola is the smallest school in history to win the title, with an undergraduate student body of just 3,863. Over the years, Loyola has had a formidable and respectable lacrosse team but always seemed to be a piece or two away from competing for a title. Not to mention Johns Hopkins, a school located about a mile down Charles Street, which consistently cast a pretty big shadow in the lacrosse world. There were plenty of milestones on the way to the lacrosse championship this season. Attackmen Mike Sawyer and Eric Lusby surpassed the school record for most goals in a single season. With 17 goals, Lusby broke the record for most goals in the N.C.A.A. tournament and was named the tournament's most outstanding player. And as a team their 18 wins match the highest total for any lacrosse program in history. Toomey kept his players focused on winning a championship all season. When the preseason poll came out and Loyola found itself ranked 21st, the team had to run sprints for every team that was ranked ahead of them. The coaching staff yelled out the name of every team in the top 20 at the start of each sprint. "It's special," long-stick midfielder Scott Ratlif said on Monday, recalling the running drills. That is the day that sticks out in your mind. When that first ranking came out in the beginning of the season, we all felt disrespected. We play with each other every day. We see Jack Runkel make these saves every day, and we see Lusby every day. "We kind of all knew we had a special team, not just because of the talent and athleticism, but because of how close we were, and how much of a family we really are," he said. These are my 45 best friends, and my brothers. So we definitely felt disrespected and credit to the coaches for doing that, because that motivated us. It was something we kept in the back of our minds all season.