PROVIDENCE — Those were some kind of hockey games the three Burke brothers played in the basement of their home in Potomac, Md.

“We’d shoot at each other with tennis balls,” said the oldest, Jordan, who still bears a scar on his forehead from a high stick in one of those high-spirited encounters.

“There were a couple of incidents,” he acknowledged, indicating with a wry smile that his parents, Glen and Michele, may have had to come downstairs more than occasionally to issue penalties for roughing. And, yes, fighting.

“We got after it,” Jordan said. “We’re all very competitive.”

Not surprisingly, all three brothers became excellent goalies.

But not in hockey, although they all played on local youth teams.

Perhaps that shouldn’t be all that surprising, either, because, in Maryland, hockey takes a distant back seat to lacrosse.

So it is that Jordan, now a senior at Brown, is in his third season as the starter for the Bears. Younger brother Steven is a freshman at Johns Hopkins, where he’s the backup goalie for the defending national champion Blue Jays. Brandon, the youngest of the Burke boys, is an eighth-grader, about to follow in his older brothers’ footsteps at the Bullis School. Jordan refers to him as “the prodigy.”

It would be a prodigious accomplishment, indeed, for young Brandon if he could do as well as big brother Jordan.

“The resurgence of Brown lacrosse has so much to do with the play of Jordan,” Bears coach Lars Tiffany said.

The Bears had endured five straight, sub-.500 seasons in the Ivy League until last year, when, with Burke in goal, they went from worst to first, finishing 5-1 in the Ivies and sharing the league title with Cornell.

Burke was named Ivy League Player of the Year in 2008 after leading the nation in save percentage (.674) and ranking second nationally in goal-against average (6.43).

Although his numbers aren’t quite as good this season — save percentage of .616, goals-against average of 7.71, going into yesterday’s afternoon’s disappointing, upset loss to Penn — Burke has been better than ever.

“He’s outstanding,” Tiffany said after the Quakers, who lost to Division II Bryant last month in Smithfield, 15-11, and were 1-4 in league play, dealt a severe blow to Brown’s hopes of repeating as Ivy champions by nipping the Bears, 7-6, at rain-soaked Stevenson Field.

 “We rely so much on Jordan,” Tiffany said. “How many good shots did (the Quakers) have on him? If we could have generated as many good shots as they had, I feel we’d have won.”

The Bears lost, not because of any shortcomings on the part of Burke, who stopped 15 of 22 shots, but because they couldn’t win faceoffs — only 2 of 10 in the second half, and just 1 of 6 in the fourth quarter — and didn’t take advantage of the offensive opportunities they had, especially in the first quarter.

Brown, which came in 9-1 on the year, 2-0 in the Ivy League, and on an eight-game winning streak, had scored at least 11 goals in each of its last five games. Because the Quakers had been having big trouble stopping opponents — they were shredded for 21 goals by Cornell — they recently had adopted a much more deliberate offensive style, holding the ball almost to the point of stalling. Those tactics nearly led to an upset of Princeton on Tuesday night in Philadelphia, as the Quakers took the nationally fourth-ranked Tigers into overtime before losing, 10-9.

“They were giving up a lot of goals,” said Tiffany, “so they decided to reduce the number of shots against them. They’ve switched to a more patient offense. It was very effective, especially in these weather conditions, and since they were winning so many faceoffs.

“We like to play fast and, in the rain and mud, we weren’t able to do the quick dodges and changes of direction we like to run on offense.”

“They had a lot of long possessions,” Burke noted. “They were really grinding it out on offense.”

Now it’s the Bears who’ll have to grind, with games coming up this week at Harvard and cross-town rival Providence College, followed by matchups against nationally third-ranked Cornell and Princeton.

“We need to win them all,” Burke said. “We still have a chance to make a statement by beating, not only the top teams in the Ivy League, but two of the tops teams in the country.”

With one of the best goalies in the country, the Bears are a legitimate threat to beat any team — not just in the Ivy League, but in all of collegiate lacrosse.