Syracuse's senior class leaves behind a legacy marked both by a painful fall and, more importantly, a brilliant rise.

The cover of Inside Lacrosse's 2005 recruiting issue featured the magazine's second, third and fourth-ranked recruits, all three staring out at the camera and into three futures that looked, at the time, like perfection. All three were in Orange.

Four years later, those three men, Syracuse's Kenny Nims, Pat Perritt and Dan Hardy, are All-Americans - Nims, the country's leading scorer, on the second team with Hardy, and Perritt on the third team; And on Monday, they and eight other seniors will walk onto the Gillette Stadium field for their final game in Orange, taking on Cornell in the D-I national championship game. It's a chance to end a career that could have gone so wrong - and for a time, did, with the Orange hitting an almost unprecedented trough in 2007 - by clinching the team's second straight national championship, a feat that hasn't been accomplished by Syracuse since 1990, when the Orange finished a string of three straight titles under legendary coach Roy Simmons, Jr.

By Monday, all three national championship trophies could be making their way back to three schools separated by about 25 miles. And now, with lacrosse at an all-time high in popularity, the trifecta would bring the game back to one of its birthplaces.

Video Interviews: Le Moyne's Brian Welch | Cortland's Cody Hoyt and Connor Duffy | Tewaaraton Finalists, Including Syracuse's Matt Abbott

Theirs is the land of forever hills and tireless clouds, of a winter that arrives always too early and lasts far too long, of cornfields and trees and rust-wrapped mills. Onondaga and Cortland Counties are places famous for their natural beauty - sitting, as they do, on the northeast tip of the Finger Lakes region - but, like the rest of Upstate, routinely abused by outsiders, including their downstate neighbors in The City.

Said American singer Connie Francis: "There are some cities that I did take time out to study, because I love history and one of them was Boston, and of course Rome and all of those places like that. But, in Syracuse or Rochester, or any of those places, no."

Three hundred miles from Boston, with just three games remaining in the NCAA men's lacrosse season, this place has also become perhaps the most fertile land in lacrosse.

With defending D-I champ Syracuse at the center, the possibility exists that all three national championship trophies will make their way back to one 25-mile stretch in Central New York. On Sunday, in the D-II final, it'll be Le Moyne (located in Syracuse) playing for its third crown in four years, with Cortland State out for its second D-III crown in four years. And in Monday's D-I final, Syracuse takes on Cornell, a team a little outside the immediate region, but just over 50 miles from the Carrier Dome.