Amid the spontaneous celebration, when sticks, orange gloves and Virginia players themselves went flying across the turf, Cavaliers freshman attacker and former McDonogh star McCabe Millon sprinted toward the veteran hand, grad student Connor Shellenberger, who had just delivered the double-overtime winner in a thrilling 11-10 victory over Johns Hopkins in an NCAA Division I men’s quarterfinal.

“I thanked him for scoring that goal and [told him] that I love him,” Millon said. “He’s been a role model for me the whole year.”

Millon, though, the nation’s top recruit as a high schooler, more than rose to the occasion, too. He collected three goals, including the tying score, and had three assists in front of 9,642 fans at Towson University to help push sixth-seeded Virginia into next weekend’s Final Four at Lincoln Financial Field.

“These are the moments that you dream of as a kid,” Millon said. “Being able to play in this awesome venue with a chance to go the Final Four was something I’ve dreamed about for a long time.”

The Cavaliers (12-5) ended third-seeded Johns Hopkins’ season — and spoiled what for much of Sunday’s game looked like an outcome that would set up a Blue Jays matchup against Maryland in the NCAA semifinals. “You saw two teams completely empty the tank out there,” Cavaliers coach Lars Tiffany said.

Hopkins (11-5) led or was tied with Virginia for the entirety of the game — until, on a designed play coming out of a timeout, Shellenberger got his hands free on the right wing and zipped a high shot past Blue Jays goalie Chayse Ierlan, setting off a national title-winning-ish celebration.

The Blue Jays stood stunned, meanwhile, grappling with a loss in the quarterfinal round for the second straight season; last year was against eventual national champion Notre Dame in a game that wasn’t nearly as close as this one. Against Virginia, Hopkins led 10-7 late in the third quarter — and 4-0 in the first — but went 23 minutes without scoring down the stretch.

Virginia ended on a 4-0 run. Millon tied the score with 2:59 left in regulation on a dodge between two defenders in the crease on a play that was video reviewed. It looked like one or possibly both of Millon’s feet could have been in the crease as he took the shot, but the goal was upheld after several minutes of a look at replays that aired on the scoreboard at Towson.

Asked if he received an explanation from officials on the outcome of the review, Johns Hopkins coach Peter Milliman paused, then said simply, “No.” He also initially struggled to find the words to describe the culmination of the best run of his four years in Baltimore.

“I’m having a tough time getting my thoughts past this group. It’s a tough loss, a tough way to end the season,” Milliman said, before speaking about a group of grad students and seniors including leading scorers Jacob Angelus and Garrett Degnon.

“[My] heart breaks for them in this situation,” he said, “but they have left this program in a great place, they have set standards and held each other to those and those are building blocks for us going forward. Everybody that’s leaving their jersey here has left it better than they found it, and I don’t think that I could say that enough times.”

Hopkins lost the possession battle — faceoffs were 16-10 in favor of Virginia and Hopkins committed 25 turnovers to the Cavaliers’ 19 — but Ierlan kept the Blue Jays in the game with 15 saves, a number at point-blank range in the second half.

After one of them, Ierlan fed an outlet pass, then held his arms in the air behind the play, signaling to the offense to slow the pace, but it didn’t happen. Instead, Virginia forced a turnover at the top of the box and Payton Cormier scored in transition to cut the lead to 10-9.

“I don’t think they did anything necessarily different,” Angelus said. “I think we had limited possessions in the fourth quarter, and we didn’t take advantage of them. They did a great job just clamping down.”

In the first half, the Blue Jays offense did its most work to build an 8-5 lead at the break. The Jays started fast enough to chase Virginia starting goalie Matthew Nunes early, after a long goal from freshman defender Quintan Kilrain punctuated the four-goal Hopkins run in the first 6:36 of the game.

Sophomore Kyle Morris (Gilman) relieved Nunes and ended up with eight saves, including two in the first OT, and is now in consideration to start against Maryland.

“We’ve been seeing Kyle playing better,” in practice, Tiffany said. “There were one or two [of our] coaches who thought we should start Kyle. I was like, ‘Whoa, whoa, first start? NCAA quarterfinals against Johns Hopkins?’ Especially for a guy from Gilman. It’s a big, big, big moment. But a couple outside shots went in from 15 yards and I said let’s go with the guy who’s been practicing better.”

Hopkins senior Russell Melendez, a Severna Park native and Archbishop Spalding product, had four goals in the first two periods. His first two came on right-handed rips from the nearly identical spot on the field in the left alley, about 15 yards from Nunes. Then there was the cross-face catch-and-score on the right doorstep past Morris, coming off a sharp Angelus pass from behind goal line extended. And, on Melendez’s fourth, Angelus fed him again in an unsettled situation to set up a Melendez leap toward the crease for a layup. That gave Hopkins a 7-4 lead with 6:15 to go before halftime.

Angelus finished with a goal and five assists. Degnon had a hat trick and two assists.

Hopkins controlled possession and took advantage of a pair of penalties to build its early lead, but Millon got going quickly when given the chance. He had four points by halftime. He assisted on Virginia’s first goal and scored two straight in the second quarter to cut the Blue Jays’ lead to 5-4 at the 9:39 mark. Millon added a first-half assist on a goal making the score 7-5.

“Wow, he stepped up,” Tiffany said.

During breaks in the action, the Virginia coach said he asked offensive coordinator Kevin Cassese if he thought Millon was trying to “take over the game too much.”

“We need him to,” Cassese replied. “We’re not scoring a lot of goals right now.”

“He rose to the moment,” Tiffany said. “McCabe was here to win the game, not simply manage it or try not to lose the game. That intensity, that belief in self, is why he was the No. 1 recruit in the country and why we’re very fortunate to have him.”

Late in the game, Millon showed remarkable poise. In an unsettled situation early in the fourth quarter, he grabbed a loose ball near the end line and fed midfielder Jack Boyden up top for a score to make it a two-goal game. He had a fourth goal waved off also for being more obviously in the crease.

“It was incredible. The atmosphere was unbelievable. It was loud down there,” Millon said. “I’m looking forward to seeing what it’s going to be like next week.”

About that: Virginia will turn its attention to Maryland, which beat second-seeded Duke 14-11 on Long Island as part of another set of quarterfinals Saturday.

It’ll be a rematch of Virginia’s 14-10 win over Maryland on March 16 and a renewal of a seemingly regular postseason series, including when Virginia edged the Terps 17-16 for the 2021 national title. “It’s becoming a relationship in May,” Tiffany said.

How Maryland advanced

Against Duke on Saturday, the Terps (10-5) battled back from a four-goal first-quarter deficit, lifted by an important performance from graduate student faceoff taker Luke Wierman. He won 20 of 29 draws and scored a pair of first-half goals to help keep Duke from extending its early lead, and his 11 wins on 15 faceoffs in the second half were critical.

In the final three quarters, the Terps outscored the Blue Devils 13-6. Maryland took its first lead with 10:16 left in the fourth quarter on a score from sophomore attacker Braden Erksa. Terps senior attacker Daniel Maltz had the go-ahead score with 5:01 to go and added another, his fourth, with 3:03 left to ice the game.

“When Luke not only wins faceoffs but is able turn a couple into goals, that let us hang in there for a while,” Maryland coach John Tillman said. “At halftime, we [said] we’re probably playing as poorly as we could to a certain extent, so let’s reset and try to win the third quarter. We were able to do that ... then we just had to play a really good fourth quarter.”

They did, besting Duke 7-2 in the fourth to advance the Terps to their first Final Four since the program’s 18-0 national championship season in 2022.

“It was hard to get everybody on the same page because we were all really excited. There’s good and bad with that,” said Wierman, who had eight ground balls to set a career program record with 456. “We were stressing with the guys in the huddle, ‘Everyone take a deep breath. This game’s far from over,’ and reiterating the little things we need to focus on.”

In a few days, everything will be magnified.

“Anytime you get to play a team twice, especially when you lost to them, it doesn’t really happen often, that second-chance opportunity,” Maryland senior defenseman Ajax Zappitello. “That’s going to be the message throughout the week, but at the same time we have to focus on us.”

Denver moves on too

In Sunday’s first quarterfinal game at Towson, fifth-seeded Denver beat fourth-seeded Syracuse 10-8 to advance to face top-ranked Notre Dame in the other national semifinal matchup on Saturday in Philadelphia.

Junior midfielder Mic Kelly (Calvert Hall) scored the game’s first goal for Denver (13-3) in a return to his hometown of Towson. Another local, Gilman product and senior midfielder Jack Tortolani, had an assist on a JJ Sillstrop score that gave the Pioneers a 9-5 lead with 2:13 left in the third quarter.

Maryland women’s season finished

The fourth-seeded Maryland women lost to unseeded Florida 15-9 in the NCAA quarterfinal round on Thursday in College Park.

Bel Air native Maggi Hall had six goals to lead the Gators (20-2), who opened the game on a 9-0 run and advanced to their second Final Four.

Florida will play top-seeded Northwestern in a national semifinal Friday in Cary, North Carolina. No. 2 Boston College will face No. 3 Syracuse in the other semifinal. The championship is at noon on Sunday.

The Terps’ season ends with a 14-6 record.

Corey McLaughlin is a veteran writer and editor who has covered sports in Baltimore for a decade, including for Baltimore magazine, USA Lacrosse Magazine and several other publications.