When Dom Starsia decided to leave Brown to become lacrosse coach at Virginia, a friend said to him: “The good news is, now you can go the Final Four every year. The bad news is, if you don’t get there, people are going to want to know why.”

The best news is that, for the second year in a row, the fifth in the last seven, and the 11th time in his 17 seasons as coach of the Cavaliers, Starsia again has his team in the Final Four – and as the No. 1 seed, no less.

He has won three national championships at Virginia – the most recent in 2006, when the Cavaliers were 17-0 and won the national title game by eight goals – and twice has lost in the finals.

As much as he loved Brown, where he captained the team as a senior in 1974 and was a standout defenseman on the Bears’ 1973 Ivy League championship team, Starsia never could have achieved that sort of success at his alma mater.

Although he won two Ivy championships, finished second in the league five times and took the Bears to the NCAA tournament five times in his 10 years as coach from 1983 to 1992, he never got to the Final Four.

The difference in the two programs was evidenced this year, when the Bears, coached by one of Starsia’s former players at Brown, Lars Tiffany, made their first NCAA appearance since 1997, losing in overtime in the opening round at Johns Hopkins, 12-11. Had they won, the Bears would have played Virginia, which routed the Blue Jays, 19-8, in the quarterfinals last weekend.

“Lars loses in the first round to Hopkins in a close game and everybody loves him,” Starsia said this week, chuckling. “We weren’t playing very well at the end of the regular season. I was thinking that, if we lost to Villanova in the first round, I’d be hanging by thumbs outside my office window. At Virginia, we’re at the point where even getting to the Final Four isn’t always enough.”

But that was the challenge Starsia wanted when he made what personally – if not professionally – was the difficult decision to leave Brown.

“I was at Brown for 22 years,” said Starsia, who was a football player when he arrived on campus in the fall of 1970. “I knew that, if I didn’t take the opportunity to go to Virginia, I’d probably stay in Providence forever. I was still young enough to want to try another adventure.”

Lacrosse itself was an adventure for Starsia when he came to Brown, never having played the game before.

“A buddy of his dragged him to the lacrosse field freshman year,” recalled Jim Hahn, a Providence attorney who was a senior on the team when the Bears went undefeated in the Ivies in 1973.

“I remember Dom standing outside his fraternity house in all kinds of weather, passing and catching the ball with different people,” Hahn said. “He’d wear them out, one after the other. And, if nobody would play with him, he’d bang the ball off the wall.”

By his junior year, Starsia had developed into an all-Ivy defender.

“He was always in position,” Hahn said, “and rarely, if ever, beaten. And he was an ‘automatic’ clear. If you needed to get the ball (into the offensive zone), you’d just flip it to Starsia and let him deal with it.

“He’d either run by guys or, I remember one time, he threw a pass about 70 yards to an attackman breaking across the field and hit him on the run. I thought: ‘Wow! His skills have certainly improved!’ ”

Having made himself into a top-flight player, it seemed natural that Starsia would go into coaching. After graduation, he became an assistant to Cliff Stevenson at Brown, and then succeeded his old coach in 1983.

As a head coach, Starsia brought in not only such highly recruited players as Darren Lowe, Andy Towers and David Evans – all Ivy League Players of the Year – he also went after overachieving players such as Tiffany, who said he would have ended up at Clarkson or Delaware had Brown not shown interest.

“We absolutely adored Dom,” said Tiffany, who was captain of the Bears as a senior in 1990. “There was no question of our devotion and loyalty to him. He assembled a group of young men who would run through brick walls for him.”

Starsia has done the same thing at Virginia, where he’s had the added advantage of having the full complement of 12.5 scholarships at a school with great tradition, both academically and in lacrosse.

“Dom is a ‘players coach.’ He allows you to play the game,” said Tiffany, who takes the same approach with at Brown – prepare your players well, then put the game in their hands.

“For a lot of coaches, especially in playoff games, every possession becomes the Holy Grail,” Tiffany said. “Not Dom. His teams always push the ball. Players love to play for him, because of his style of play.”

The run-and-gun Cavaliers jumped out to an 18-0 lead against overmatched Villanova in the opening round of the tournament two weeks ago. Last weekend, in Annapolis, they overwhelmed Johns Hopkins.

“It goes back to my Brown days,” Starsia said. “I was an athlete who came to the game late. I recruit kids who are athletes and who have confidence. It’s silly to shackle those kinds of guys. Lacrosse is a fluid game. It’s best played when kids think on their feet.”

Hahn, who grew up in Dundalk, a gritty neighborhood outside the lacrosse hotbed of Baltimore, said Starsia has made the Cavaliers a much tougher team, both physically and mentally, than they used to be.

“They always had talent,” Hahn said. “But, a lot of times, they wasted it. When Dom first got down there, he basically told the team they weren’t tough enough.

“He recruits athletes. He gets guys with size and speed and makes them into lacrosse players.”

“They’re big, fast, and unpredictable,” Tiffany said of the 15-2 Cavaliers, who’ll take on fifth-seeded Cornell in the nightcap of Saturday afternoon’s semifinal doubleheader at Gillette Stadium, which opens with Syracuse taking on Duke at noon.

What was predictable was Starsia’s success at Virginia.

“If he was getting guys like Evans, Towers and Lowe to come to Brown,” Hahn said, “then you had to figure that, when he got Virginia, he was really going to roll. And he has.”

jdonalds@projo.com /401-277-7340