Denver Pioneers to unleash a raging Rhino in lacrosse battle with No. 1 Notre Dame | Mark Kiszla

Who wins a rasslin' match between a rhino and a leprechaun?

We’re fixing to find out. And the University of Denver Pioneers are itching for a fight.

Notre Dame is the No. 1-ranked lacrosse team in the country. With a 14-1 record, the defending national champs are prohibitive favorites to emerge victorious from the Final Four and take home the trophy again.

But here’s a word of warning to the Fighting Irish: You’ve never wrestled a rhino like Alec Stathakis, the face-off specialist that infuses the University of Denver lacrosse team with competitive juice.

“We call him the Rhino. He’s strong,” said coach Matt Brown, whose fifth-ranked Pioneers will play Notre Dame on Saturday in the semifinals.

The Rhino wears No. 37 for DU. For you NFL combine fans in the audience, Stathakis can bench press 225 pounds 20 times. And, yes, he did play football in high school. Linebacker. Fullback. Of course.

“I miss football,” Stathakis told me Tuesday. “I was a bowling ball. Mostly a blocking back. But if you needed 2 yards, you handed me the football to push the pile.”

He packs 210 pounds of steel on his 5-foot-11 frame. Stathakis owns a sportcoat, but doesn’t recall what size. I’m no tailor but can tell you this: The material required to make a jacket big enough to house his hulking chest would also be ample to construct a four-man tent.

The calling card of these Pioneers, who have surrendered only nine goals per game, is a defense so strong it can crush a foe’s spirit. In a system that wants to dictate the pace of play with iron fists and tough sticks, that puts a premium on what Stathakis does best. He wins face-offs, which he has done more than 230 times in 16 games this season, turning a dead-ball situation into an advantage for his teammates.

The rallying cry of this intense Denver team: Bring the juice.

And nobody can bring that jolt-of-taurine energy like Stathakis does.

“He’s a competitor. He might be the greatest competitor that we’ve ever had in our program,” said Brown, a human encyclopedia of DU lacrosse who has bled crimson and gold since joining the Pioneers as a player way back in 2002. “I’d put Jack Hannah and Jeremy Noble up there with him. But Alec is a guy you want to go to battle with every single game.”

Let me assure you: The Rhino will be snorting intense and rip-roaring to go against Notre Dame.

Born and raised in Michigan, he enthusiastically rooted for both Big Blue and Sparty to beat the fight out of the Irish on the football field.

What’s more, Stathakis played his prep lacrosse at Culver Military Academy, located 40 miles to the south of Notre Dame’s campus. So he has done more than his share of time living in the Land of the Leprechaun, hearing as much yada, yada, yada about the greatness of Golden Domer athletics as any young man needs to hear.

Inspired by their pals on the DU hockey team, the lax guys want to hoist a shiny trophy of their own in 2024.

“We want to leave a legacy,” said Stathakis, among a group of fifth-year DU players who bonded as freshmen when the government's COVID-19 restrictions turned all their lives upside down after heading off to college.

“This has been a goal all along: To win a national championship. We’re not satisfied just getting there (to Philadelphia, in order to collect T-shirts from the Final Four). We want to win the whole thing.”

The Irish are loaded with so much talent they will need no luck to win it all. But until taking the field, I’m not sure if Notre Dame can be fully prepared for the power and passion Stathakis brings to the game.

Mess around with a rhino and find out.