Box: Washington 49, St. Clair 45

PHILADELPHIA — The Denver men’s lacrosse program restored itself as a national title contender this season. The Pioneers’ second NCAA tournament championship, however, will have to wait for another year. The fifth-seeded Pioneers struggled to generate possessions as top-seeded Notre Dame pulled away in the second half for a 13-6 victory in the NCAA semifinals before 32,269 at Lincoln Financial Field. Richie Connell and Michael Lampert each scored twice, and Malcolm Kleban made nine of his 10 saves in the first half for the Pioneers (13-4), who were denied their second national championship game appearance and first since winning the title in 2015. “I thought we probably needed to have a perfect game today, and that we did not,” first-year coach Matt Brown said.

Ezequiel Tovar is quietly becoming a star. While the Rockies’ reconstruction project will likely take years, the soft-spoken Tovar is rapidly becoming one of baseball’s best shortstops. And he’s only 22 years old. Last Tuesday night at the Oakland Coliseum, Tovar had the first two-homer game of his career. His fifth-inning blast traveled 443 feet, his seventh-inning shot went 411.

Now in the spirit of the holiday weekend, the wise-apples in the Grading The Week offices swear they’re asking this question with no malice, no agenda, no anger, no animosity, no bias, no enmity, no predilection: Could Tad Boyle wind up producing more first-round draft picks out of CU in the next 10 months than Deion Sanders? You … haters!

For a handful of teams around the NHL, it is existential crisis season. Early playoff exits lead to macro-level discussions like does Team X have the right core players or does Team Y’s style of play not work when the calendar flips to May. The Colorado Avalanche has a different kind of offseason ahead, but the road might be just as arduous. This core group of Avs has reached the mountaintop.

The days are long, but the years are short. This advice is advanced to parents about raising children. It applies to life, but in our case sports. My wife and I were thrilled our two sons showed interest the first time they held a bat and threw a ball. It was in the family DNA with her past as a cheerleader and her brothers playing football and my life growing up as an identical twin with my father serving as a coach for all seasons. I was ecstatic when our oldest son Dagin first used a spoon left-handed as a baby, viewing him as a pitcher.

The way this ended will stick with the Nuggets for much longer than one offseason. It’ll be remembered as one of the more painful what-if moments in Denver sports history. Whether the Nuggets would have repeated as champions will never be answered. It’s easy to conflate one climactic failure with the full body of work.