PROVIDENCE — The Bears are back!

Just two years after finishing last in the Ivy League at 0-6, Brown’s men’s lacrosse team grabbed a share of the league title yesterday with an exhilarating, 6-5 victory over perennial power Princeton in front of a chilled, but thrilled, crowd of 2,913 at Stevenson Field.

“This is the best,” said Brown goalie Jordan Burke, whose clutch save of a hard shot by the Tigers’ co-captain, Bob Schneider — who’d already scored two goals — with 1:37 left to play preserved the win and enabled the Bears to finish first, tied with Cornell at 5-1, for the first time since 1995.

For a long time, Brown was annually one of the top teams not just in the Ivy League, but in the country. But that was a long time ago.

Under two former players, Dom Starsia and Peter Lasagna, the Bears won four Ivy titles from 1985 through 1997, finished second five times, and went to the NCAA Tournament eight times.

But then the program went into a tailspin and, in the decade prior to this season, Brown finished over .500 only once in the Ivy League. Heading into this year, the Bears had lost 14 of their last 15 league games.

The turnaround began when another former player — Lars Tiffany, class of 1990 — was hired last season to replace Scott Nelson, who was 11-25 against the Ivies in his six years as coach.

“He believes in us,” said Burke. “He knows the game incredibly well, and he’s a great teacher.”

Among the things Tiffany has taught his young Bears, said senior midfielder Michael Cummins, is to “expect nothing, earn everything.

“Our practices now are much more competitive,” Cummins said. “We practice with an edge because everybody knows they have to earn their playing time.

“He’s got us playing hard, fast and loose. It’s what we call a ‘Brown State’ style of play. That’s the way Brown played when it had all those tournament teams.”

Tiffany, who played in two NCAA Tournaments with the Bears, says “Brown State” was a term coined when he was a player.

“We used it to define what it meant to play Brown lacrosse — a sense of toughness, fearlessness, having an edge,” he said.

Fittingly, many of the alumni from the glory days — including Starsia, who’s now the coach at Virginia where he’s won three national championships, and Lasagna, who’s coaching at Bates after having led the Bears to their only Final Four appearance, in 1994 — were on hand yesterday.

Before the game, Rich Meister, who was a member of Brown’s 1973 Ivy League title team, gave Tiffany his championship watch to wear for good luck.

“I told him I wasn’t going to put one on until I won one,” Tiffany said. “But I did put it in my pocket.”

Tiffany will have a championship watch one of his own now.

“I’m pinching myself a little bit,” he said.

What made the win a bit hard to believe was that the Bears trailed after the first quarter, 2-0, and didn’t score in the fourth quarter, either. But they got four goals in the second — two by sophomore attackman Thomas Muldoon — and then added two more in the third, both by freshman Andrew Feinberg, who also assisted on one of Muldoon’s goals.

Muldoon was Brown’s leading scorer this season, finishing with 30 goals, while Feinberg had 15 goals and 15 assists.

Had Princeton won yesterday, the Tigers would have gotten the league’s automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament because they’d beaten Cornell. Now, Princeton is out of the tourney and Cornell, which beat Brown last weekend, 11-7, is in.

The Bears, despite their 11-3 overall record, are on the bubble, largely because of their RPI.

While it would be disappointing if they miss out on the NCAA tourney, nothing can detract from the tremendous turnaround the program has made in just two seasons under Tiffany.

“To see ‘2008’ on that banner,” said Cummins, pointing to a banner displaying the years of Brown’s Ivy League championships hanging on a fence at the south end of Stevenson Field, “every year I come back here for the rest of my life means everything to me.

“It’s the best feeling in the world to know we’ve put things back on track.”

The Bears are back on top of the Ivy League.

And, with Burke, Muldoon, Feinberg, Kyle Hollingsworth — indeed, almost all of their top players — coming back, the Bears are likely to stay there.

Princeton

2 1 1 1 — 5

Brown

0 4 2 0 — 6

BROWN (6): Feinberg, Andrew 2, Muldoon, Thomas 2, Hollingsworth, Kyle, Caldwell, Zach; assists — Feinberg, Andrew, Hollingsworth, Kyle.

PRINCETON (5): Schneider, Bob 2, Davis, Tommy 2, Hewit, Alex; assists — Haynie, Alex, Lesko, Josh, MacKenzie, Scott, McBride, Chris

Shots — P 10-4-5-10 — 29, B 2-11-9-4 — 26.Men’s lacrosse

Brown

6

Princeton

5