STANFORD >> It couldn’t have gone any better for the Stanford women’s rugby team.

Playing on their home turf against rival Cal, the Cardinal earned their second consecutive USA Rugby Women’s Division 1 national championship on Saturday night with a dominant 57-25 win.

It was the sixth overall title for Stanford (11-0), which hadn’t won since 2008 before winning the championship last year in Houston after a five-hour lightning delay.

But while that win was far from home and was played in front of a sparse crowd because of the weather, this one came with packed stands at Steuber Rugby Stadium, which was hosting the final for the first time since 2012.

When the final whistle blew, Stanford students poured onto the field to join the players in celebration.

“Being here and seeing everyone in the stands and seeing the energy when people rushed onto the field, it was honestly a little overwhelming,” said sophomore Kiersten Lees, who was named MVP.

Stanford returned all but two players from last year’s team. Besides two close games against Cal Poly, which won the D2 championship earlier on Saturday, Stanford’s closest win this season was 36-21 against Cal two months ago. The Cardinal advanced to the final by beating Arizona 70-12 and Western Washington 42-10.“Honestly it means everything,” Lees said. “Coming off of a championship, there was a lot of pressure to perform to reach that same standard, and I’m proud that we had the discipline and the tenacity to go back and put in the hard work.”

Stanford set the tone early, scoring the first 14 points and taking a 26-5 lead.

“We knew they were going to come out hard and try to crush us in the first 10 minutes,” Cardinal captain Leila Wang Gowett said. “We were thinking about showing them in the first set piece, in the first play, how can we show them we want this more.”

Cal got within 26-15 with 34 minutes left, but Lees scored two tries in three minutes to put Stanford back up by 21. Freshman Chisa Ogaki then took advantage of a turnover and ran 60 meters untouched for a try to seal the win.

Stanford coach Richard Ashfield credited the team’s kicking game and defensive pressure, along with the physical impact of subs Hope Addhanome-Shipman and Madisyn Cunningham, for the championship-deciding second-half run.

It was the first championship game appearance for a Cal program established in 1998.

“For them, there’s so many things that they’re adjusting to in this game,” Cal coach Katie Chou said of her players. “There’s a pressure to this game, being in this type of crowd, being in this high-visibility game, that we just flat-out have not experienced before, so I think what you saw is that there were lulls while we were adjusting, but we finished strong. Every year we keep climbing. We were nowhere close to this last year, so this program’s going to keep rolling.”

The Cardinal eventually scored 31 consecutive points to extend the lead to 57-15 until Cal scored two tries in the final two minutes.

“What I’ve been thinking the whole season is, after last year we got hungry and we got a taste of what it was like to win the national championship, so we came back here thinking that we wanted to do it again and pushing ourselves,” Gowett said. “Tonight, under the lights, all that hard work really showed.”

Gowett said no Stanford player had played competitive rugby before coming to The Farm. Some, like Ogaki, hadn’t picked up a rugby ball until seven months ago.

While Stanford celebrated, Cal supporters also went onto the field and formed a human tunnel for the Bears to run through, honoring the program’s most successful season to date.

“I’m proud of this team,” Chou said. “We’ve never been here before and unfortunately the score didn’t go our way, but like I said to them in the circle, we’ll be back. We’ll definitely be back. They didn’t get all the way, but they’ve made history.”