Charles Nailen/The Hoya Junior goalkeeper Sarah Robinson tries to stop Notre Dame senior attack Lauren Fischer’s free position shot during Georgetown’s 9-7 win on Saturday.

The last time the Georgetown and Notre Dame women’s lacrosse teams met, the Hoyas scraped out a 16-15 overtime win. When they met again Saturday, the contest appeared to be heading in the same direction.

Last year’s team relied on nine goals from then-senior Wick Stanwick (MSB ’03) to get the job done; this time around, nine goals marked the Hoyas’ total offensive output, with seven different players contributing to eke out a 9-7 win over the Fighting Irish in the last few minutes of play.

“We didn’t necessarily play great for the entire game, but we played great when we needed to, which was at the end,” Head Coach Kim Simon told her team after the game. “There were some key moments, which we’ve talked about before in other games, where either players didn’t step up or we didn’t make the big plays and today we did that,” she added.

The Georgetown offense was visibly slow at the outset of the game. After winning the draw, the Hoyas passed the ball around the Irish net looking for a shot for the first minute of play. It took several possessions and more than seven minutes for Georgetown to score.

Senior midfielder Anouk Peters capitalized on a free position shot. Just two minutes later, freshman attack Coco Stanwick found senior midfielder Michi Ellers, whose shot bounced off the ground and slipped into the lower right corner of the net to give Georgetown a 2-0 lead. Junior midfielder Lauryn Bernier added a goal just before the 18-minute mark before Notre Dame took over.

True to their name, the Fighting Irish fought back, reeling off four goals over the next 10 minutes. Every class contributed to the scoring effort, as sophomore midfielder Crysti Foote scored at the 11-minute mark. Freshman midfielder Meghan Murphy and junior attack Jackie Bowers followed just 25 seconds apart to knot the game at three apiece. With time winding down in the first half, senior attack Meredith Simon gave Notre Dame a 4-3 lead.

The Hoyas nabbed the ensuing draw and senior midfielder Gloria Lozano cut across the goal, taking an assist from Stanwick and retying the game at 4-4 with only three ticks left on the clock before the break.

“Notre Dame is a tough team; they’re feisty and they worked really hard. The play at the end of the first half when the clock was ticking away, to be able to get that goal in there was huge,” Simon said. “At halftime we just had to pull everyone back in and relax, play our game and realize that it didn’t have to be anything necessarily special; it just had to be together and be good teamwork.”

Georgetown retook the lead early in the second half when junior attack Catherine Elbe fired one past the Irish goalie just over a minute and a half in. Notre Dame’s response was delayed but effective. In just over two minutes, the Fighting Irish put together three consecutive goals. First Simon picked up a rebounded shot and fired it in, then sophomore attack Mary McGrath scored twice, 29 seconds apart, putting the Irish up 7-5.

Two Georgetown goals from two junior midfielders tied the game for a third time. Junior mid Allison Chambers knocked back the first goal just a minute after McGrath’s Notre Dame goal. Seven minutes later, junior attack Sarah Oliphant tied the game at seven. The Hoyas finally went ahead again off Oliphant’s second goal at the 7:27 mark.

“We had struggled a little bit,” Oliphant said. “Something we’ve been working on this season has been playing through it because we’re not always going to have control. If it wasn’t coming from anyone else, I just took it upon myself. Hopefully that set an example for my teammates because then we all stepped up.”

The Irish had an opportunity to come back on the ensuing possession, but the Hoyas forced a turnover and went into a stall.

“Georgetown played a very controlled, deliberate game, took a lot of time off the clock and capitalized on the opportunities that they had,” Notre Dame Head Coach Tracy Coyne said. “In a big game like this, you have to be in a position to win, and unfortunately when we had the ball we turned it over, so it’s a credit to their defense. Unfortunately, that’s the way it goes sometimes.”

The next several minutes mimicked a game of keep-away as the Hoyas tried to run the last 5:30 off of the clock by passing all over the field. “We just felt like the way the game was going, that made the most sense,” Simons said. “We know we have pretty good ball-handlers and there were a lot of variables out there that we felt like we couldn’t control for, so it made sense for us to go into a stall.”

Junior goaltender Sarah Robinson controlled the ball by the Georgetown net and, as time ran down, initiated a succession of long passes that quickly put the ball in the stick of Elbe, who found Peters for the goal with nine ticks left, ending the long stall and securing the 9-7 win for Georgetown.

The victory gives the Hoyas a 9-2 record overall and wraps up a fourth-consecutive Big East title with a 5-0 conference record. They travel to Penn State to take on the Nittany Lions Wednesday at 3 p.m.