For more than three decades, two of Navy's marquee teams (some would argue football and lacrosse are the marquee teams) carried the burden of absurdly long losing streaks to their respective sport's royalty.

Football dropped 43 in a row to Notre Dame ... until a victory last fall in South Bend.

And on Saturday, the Midshipmen will look to snap a 33-game skid against Johns Hopkins in lacrosse. It's a streak that pops up as a point of discussion at this time every year, and it is an inevitable thing to ask about whenever I'm in Annapolis the week of a Hopkins game.

The Notre Dame thing, however, gives the angle a little more life this time around.

"I'm friends with a lot of football players, and they'll always joke 'Yeah, we took care of our streak. What are you going to do about yours?'" senior defenseman Jordan DiNola said. "Pretty much our entire senior class on the lacrosse team were at that game. It was pretty special being there and being able to watch it."

That wasn't necessarily the answer I was expecting, since that game wasn't just around the corner from the academy. So I'll let DiNola continue the "Road Trip: Navy Style" story.

"We took an RV," DiNola said. "We went through the night [Friday]. We got there around around 5 the morning before the game, slept for a couple hours and then woke up and started getting ready for the game.We put our uniforms on and watched it. It was awesome. It was the single-greatest game I've ever been at. ...

"On Saturday night, we were out back at the RV. They actually canceled school on Monday. We still had to be back Sunday night, but we did end up kind of taking our time on Sunday so we ended up staying there Saturday night. Then Sunday, probably around 10 in the morning we woke up and got out of there, picked ourselves up and hit the road."

So it was fun to watch the one streak go down. But the Mids have come extremely close to quashing the Hopkins jinx several times this decade. Toss out a 17-3 bludgeoning in 2003, and the other seven meetings since 2000 have been decided by a total of eight goals --- including three overtime encounters.

All that suggests a Navy victory on Saturday is far from improbable.

And despite his enjoyment of the football team's defeat of Notre Dame, DiNola figures snapping the lacrosse skid would carry some significant meaning.

"Probably a little bit more," DiNola said.

--- Patrick Stevens