SUN MAR 26 2023 | MATT DASILVA

Lacrosse fans have a funny obsession with football, don’t we? We’re American, after all.

When Chris Hogan or Jared Bernhardt makes it in the NFL, we feel like we made it.

When Tom Brady or Eli Manning carries a stick for his kid, we hail him as a confirmed lacrosse guy.

When a Navy quarterback, Maryland defensive back and Stanford linebacker all decide they love lacrosse too much to stay away from the game, we put them on the cover of our magazine.

And when the entire Notre Dame football team crashes a lacrosse game at Arlotta Stadium on a 36-degree day in South Bend — some of them shirtless and screaming on the berm as the Kavanagh brothers orchestrate a third-quarter comeback — we all get hyped.

“What a cool setting to come out of halftime and have the Notre Dame football team all wild cheering on their team,” Virginia coach Lars Tiffany said after the visiting Cavaliers’ 15-10 win. “To bring that energy to the setting is something I’ll never forget. It was awesome to have such intensity at our away game.”

The announced attendance Saturday was 3,095, far more than Arlotta Stadium’s seating capacity of 2,500. As former ESPN lacrosse play-by-play guy Eamon McAnaney astutely observed, it’s ironic that the arrival of a football team at a lacrosse game only further validated that lacrosse should not be played in cavernous football stadiums.

If Notre Dame and Virginia meet again Memorial Day weekend at Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia—and all indications remain that these are two of the best teams in the country —  they’ll be hard pressed to create a better atmosphere than what we saw Saturday in South Bend.