The marvelous postseason run ended on Saturday in the NCAA second round at Bowdoin for Joseph O'Reilly and the rest of the Rivier men's lacrosse team. (Courtesy photo by Kyle Prudhomme/Rivier Athletics)

BRUNSWICK, Maine – The postseason was quite a ride for the Rivier University men’s lacrosse team.

Unfortunately for the Raiders, it ended in a monsoon of a loss.

Rivier’s run in the NCAA Championship was ended at No. 8 Bowdoin in the Second Round as the Raiders fell to the Polar Bears by a final score of 28-3 on Saturday afternoon at rain-soaked Whittier Field.

Rivier, led by head coach James DeLanoy in his 14th season, concluded its year with a 17-2 overall record, the best in its history. The Raiders’ season was full of highlights, including a 15-game winning streak that extended through the NCAA First Round following the program’s first Great Northeast Athletic Conference (GNAC) Championship.

“It’s great to get here, it’s goal we always set, to get to the NCAA playoffs, and we won the first round game,” DeLanoy said. “That put us in the situation against the No. 8 team in the country. I don’t care what the scoreboard says, this is what we wanted, we earned it to get here, and the guys played every minute of the game til the end.”

The Polar Bears, now 14-3, will host a third round matchup against No. 17 Amherst, which edged Endicott 12-11 on Saturday, today at 3 p.m.

Parker Williams notched his first goal of the campaign as one of three Rivier goal scorers on the afternoon, catching a feed on a clear from graduate student Adam Hailey and firing a bounce shot in for the Raiders’ first goal of the outing.

That actually cut the gap to 2-1 at 13:12 of the first quarter, but it was all Polar Bears after that. The Raiders trailed 14-1 at the half. Bowdoin’s Patrick Fitzgerald scored seven goals, giving him 72 on the year as Bowdoin’s single season record holder. Bowdoin’s Sam Raye-Steiner and Hudson Greene both had had tricks. The 28 goals were the second most scored in a single game in school history, and came against the Raiders’ second-ranked defense in Division III.

Graduate student Michael Ference, the GNAC Offensive Player of the Year, scored an even-strength goal in the fourth quarter before senior Chris Heitmiller logged a man-up tally less than a minute later.

Graduate student and GNAC Goalkeeper of the Year, Sawyer Gagnon, registered 17 saves while senior Samuel Tibbetts notched four stops in the final 9:59 of action.

For Gagnon, it was all worth it, as he was on teams that came up short in GNAC tourney play until this year, his fifth.

“Every year, we worked hard, and just kind of fell short,” Gagnon said. “I’m lucky enough that we were able to put it together this year. This was extra lacrosse, I got to spend time with my friends, some extra coaching, and take it all in. I’m happy to say we got here.”

“I’m not going to look forward to next season for a while, I’m going to relish in this one,” DeLanoy said. “Seventeen wins, I’m going to marinate on that for a few days. … The support has been amazing the last two weeks with what we’ve been doing, from the community.”

(Material was provided by the Rivier and Bowdoin Sports Information Departments; Telegraph Staff Writer Tom King contributed to this report)