Closing in on 33 months after his hire, Harvard’s Gerry Byrne will coach his first Ivy League game Saturday when Brown visits the Crimson.

A lot has happened since July 2019, most of it out of the control of Byrne or his players. And while Harvard has played only eight games in that span, Byrne has prioritized what can be affected on a day-to-day basis as a foundation of the Crimson’s long-term philosophy.

“How are we working through today so tomorrow can be impactful? That was our approach for two years,” Byrne said. “The past is prologue, so how you process through that is what coaches are trying to do with young people. Maybe their life up to this point had been a 45-degree angle trajectory of perfection and nothing ever going wrong, and as you get older you realize that’s not how life works.”

Harvard isn’t perfect this season, but it is off to a promising start at 3-1. The Crimson opened with a rout of NJIT, then fell 17-12 to Ohio State late last month in Naples, Fla. Harvard has since picked off Fairfield (16-12) and previously undefeated Michigan (14-9) on the road.

Now comes a four-game homestand that includes the first two league games of the season for a team that Byrne believes had its roots set in the weeks before his hire.

The job was vacant for two months, and in that time, captain Kyle Anderson and the rest of the Crimson’s seniors sized up what had gone wrong in their careers with a program that last reached the NCAA tournament in 2014 and has just two postseason trips since 1996.

“They self-evaluated, they managed the team,” Byrne said. “It could have been Lord of the Flies, but it wasn’t. Because these guys were, I think, self-aware enough about what maybe they hadn’t done and like, ‘Hey, this is our last chance.’ I think that helped set a foundation so that when we came in with our vision and our plan that we’re executing now, I wouldn’t say it was a head start, but they had coalesced around that.”

That group has since graduated, but the Crimson have shown promise in the first games in nearly two years. Harvard is holding opponents to 25.5 percent shooting and held Michigan to nine goals after the Wolverines scored at least 18 goals in five of their first seven games.

What it means is hard to say for a team that had its share of unknowns coming into the season.

“It’s this push and pull between, ‘OK, you won this game, this team was good,’ but it’s so early,” Byrne said. “We don’t know who we are. We don’t know where our opponent is going to end up and you try not to get too high after a win or too low after a loss. Coaching cliches, they’re still around because they’re usually pretty true.”

“Early” is closing in on midseason, which will segue into April soon enough. Saturday begins a stretch that should create some sense of what to make of the Crimson’s first full season under Byrne.

“We’re still putting it together,” Byrne said. “The puzzle pieces are still kind of spread all over the board, but the picture is starting to come and you can start figuring out where stuff goes. I think that’s the exciting part about putting that puzzle together.”