When my son was born, my in-laws, Long Islanders, showed up with a baby gift: a miniature lacrosse stick. As a Midwesterner, I had never seen one, but I figured it was the Northeast equivalent of putting a baseball glove in the crib.

What little I knew about the game came from acquaintances on Wall Street. Many of them had parlayed their stick skills at Ivy League or Mid-Atlantic colleges into personal connections that led to spots on trading desks, where it can be hard to swing a lacrosse stick without hitting a former attackman.

So it came as little surprise that the Ivy League chose New York to host its conference tournament this year. Yale and Cornell will meet at Lawrence A. Wien Stadium at Columbia in Sunday’s final. The league saw Columbia, and New York City, as a near-perfect laboratory to explore neutral sites for its season-ending event, which in previous years had been held on the home field of the regular-season champion.