Syracuse’s Matt Abbott (3) and teammates celebrate.

AP / Winslow Townson

FOXBORO — It was everything a lacrosse fan could have asked for, and more.

The matchups couldn’t have been better. The weather couldn’t have been better. The games couldn’t have been better.

Best of all, the better team won the first NCAA championship game held in New England since Brown hosted the tournament in 1985.

Lacrosse was still a minor sport in those days, enjoyed by relatively small cadre of devoted fans fortunate enough to have grown up with the game in pocket hotbeds such as Baltimore and Long Island, or to have played it in prep school.

The game is big-time now, its popularity increasing incrementally every year.

While fewer than 15,000 were at Brown Stadium in ’85 when Johns Hopkins rolled over Syracuse, 11-4, a championship-game-record crowd of 48,970 sun-drenched fans sat in Gillette Stadium yesterday afternoon to watch those same two perennial powers battle again for the title.

This time, it was the Orange that came out on top, 13-10.

“The team that played better won the game,” Hopkins coach Dave Pietramala said. “It’s as simple as that.”

It was a simply glorious weekend for lacrosse,

Saturday’s semifinal doubleheader couldn’t have been more exciting, with Syracuse, the No. 3 seed, overcoming a five-goal deficit with just over five minutes remaining in the third quarter and beating second-seeded Virginia in double-overtime, 12-11, followed by fifth-seeded Hopkins’ upset of No. 1 Duke, 10-9.

Yesterday, Syracuse coach John Desko sensed at halftime that his team was on the brink of winning the school’s record 10th national championship.

“You could feel it in the locker room,” he said. “This team didn’t want to be denied.”

Hopkins goalie Michael Gvozden had been denying them often in the first half, stopping 14 shots — several of them from point-blank range. Yet the Orange still led, 6-5.

“He was certainly hot early, and that can get frustrating,” said tourney MVP Mike Leveille, who scored five goals against the Cavaliers in the semis, and added another yesterday while the Orange were a man down because of a penalty. “But we have confidence in ourselves as shooters. We know that, if we keep firing, the shots eventually are going to go in.”

There is no denying that Syracuse and Hopkins are the two most storied programs in intercollegiate lacrosse.

The Blue Jays won their ninth NCAA championship last year, nipping Duke in the finals, 12-11. But they came perilously close to being unable to defend their title this season. After winning their first three games, the Jays lost five in a row — three straight in overtime (to Hofstra, Syracuse, and Virginia), followed by lopsided losses to North Carolina, 13-8, and Duke, 17-6.

That meant they had to win at least four of their final five games to finish over .500, or become the only team in Hopkins history to fail the make the NCAA tournament since its inception in 1971.

With a string of 37 straight tournament appearances — an NCAA record for any sport —on the line, Hopkins went on a tear, winning eight in a row heading into its rematch with the Orange yesterday.

“We went through some tough bumps in the road to rally and get here,” Pietramala said. “We didn’t want to be the (first Hopkins team) that didn’t get to the playoffs. We didn’t want that to be our legacy.”

Syracuse also had tradition to uphold. The Orange were left red-faced last season, when they finished 5-8 and missed the tournament for the first time since 1982.

“They were a hungry team,” Pietramala said. “When you have a proud program, and have a year like they had last year — I give them a lot of credit for the turnaround they made. That’s why they’re Syracuse.”

The Blue Jays were game — Gvozden finished with 20 saves, and marvelous midfielder Paul Rabil scored six goals — but the game belonged to the Orange, who simply had too much firepower for a Hopkins team that seemed tired physically in the second half after its difficult game with Duke.

It was a popular victory, as orange-clad Syracuse fans appeared to outnumber Hopkins supporters by about a 3-to-1 margin.

“Our fans love our program,” Leveille said. “We always expect big crowds.” It would have been hard to imagine, for anyone who was in attendance for the ’85 title game at Brown Stadium, a lacrosse final played in front of a crowd of nearly 50,000, in a stadium like the Patriots’ home in Foxboro.

But the turnout is likely to be even bigger next year, when the Final Four returns to Gillette Stadium, because this weekend turned out to be lacrosse at its best.

jdonalds@projo.com