BALTIMORE — Army had just dispensed with Holy Cross on Tuesday night and already the clock was ticking on the Black Knights’ encounter with Patriot League regular season champion Loyola in the conference tournament.

There wasn’t time to waste, even if Army wouldn’t spend much time on the field in the less than 72 hours leading up to a second encounter with the Greyhounds in two weeks.

Coach Joe Alberici quickly reviewed what Loyola’s offense had done to hurt his team in the two-man game, and made it clear how vital it would be to button those issues up while keeping the explosive Greyhounds in settled situations.

“When we were going through the scouting report, there was a lot of head-nodding to what we were doing,” Alberici said. “I said to the guys after Tuesday’s win it was going to be about 75 percent mental.”

The fourth-seeded Black Knights outwitted and outplayed Loyola, dealing the Greyhounds a stunning 7-5 defeat on Friday. Army (12-4) will face second-seeded Lehigh (9-7) in Sunday’s title game after authoring a triumph with ramifications that reverberated beyond the Ridley Athletic Complex.

Sean O’Brien scored three goals for Army, which was sharp at the defensive end from start to finish. The Black Knights gave up just one purely settled 6-on-6 goal as Loyola’s starting attack managed a meager 2-for-20 shooting night. The Greyhounds scored twice on extra man and once in transition while also throwing in a shot off a groundball near the crease.

Outside of that? Johnny Surdick helped keep Tewaaraton candidate Pat Spencer to just an assist and goalie A.J. Barretto made 13 saves as Army snapped a six-game skid against Loyola.

“You could definitely sense their frustration,” Surdick said. “They forced some feeds, threw the ball out of bound, take some bad shots — A.J.’s going to eat those up all day.”

It was an abrupt end to Loyola’s push for a fourth consecutive conference tournament title. The Greyhounds (11-4) are 8-2 all-time in the Patriot League tournament, with both losses coming at home against Army.

The first was in the 2015 quarterfinals, the end of a lost season the year after the many of the last figures from the Greyhounds’ 2012 national title team graduated. More was — and, frankly, still is — expected of this group, especially a Spencer-led offense that sprayed the ball all around the cage as it struggled to solve the poised Black Knights.

“I thought we got good looks,” Spencer said. “He made a couple of really good saves, one right on top of the crease. I think some of the shots we were taking weren’t great shots, but we got a lot of really good looks.”

But Army had an exceptional look, too, only of a different kind. The Black Knights held a two-goal halftime advantage in the teams’ regular season meeting on April 20 before Loyola dominated the last 30 minutes to earn a 13-9 victory.

Alberici referenced the recency of that game as a benefit to his team, which never trailed and held Loyola scoreless for a stretch of more than 22 minutes that began late in the first half and continued into the fourth quarter.

Loyola’s problem wasn’t a lack of possessions. It simply never established its offense, and as the night unfolded, chances that featured both time and space invariably ended up sailing over the cage or lodged in Barretto’s stick.

“These are the frustrating games because they’re big-boy games,” coach Charley Toomey said. “The team that came out was very athletic and pushed us around a little bit and it reminds me of Duke, it reminds me of Ohio State [in 2017], it reminds me of some of the bigger games that we’ve played where we just couldn’t get over the top. Tonight, we had our chances. Tonight, we had 41 shots. It wasn’t like we were limited to 20 shots. We just didn’t can them and this team has been used to canning them all year.”

There’s a national trickle-down from Loyola’s quick exit. The Greyhounds, with victories over Virginia and Johns Hopkins and a top-10 RPI, are almost certain to gobble up an at-large berth when the NCAA lacrosse committee convenes this weekend. That means somebody else — Cornell? Maryland? — was none too pleased to see a spot in the 17-team field disappear.

Loyola itself hopes that analysis is a correct one. But even if the Greyhounds wind up in the field, they may have fumbled away a chance to play another home game.

“We want another shot,” goalie Jacob Stover (14 saves) said. “That’s what we were all talking about right as we were coming up was ‘Do you think we’ll get another shot?’ Everyone’s like no matter who it is or what seed we are or if we’re unseeded and what not, we just want another shot. We know we had an opportunity today. It didn’t work out for us, but hopefully the committee is going to allow us to have Monday through Friday and be able to go and compete on Saturday.”

It will be left to Army and Lehigh to compete on Sunday. Lucas Spence scored two goals and two assists in the Mountain Hawks’ 10-9 defeat of Boston University in the second semifinal. Lehigh, which had dropped four of its last five, rattled off four consecutive goals in the third quarter and then held on to defeat the Terriers (11-6) for the second time this season.

The Mountain Hawks, making their second Patriot League final appearance in a row, will encounter a Black Knights bunch coming off arguably its two best defensive outings of the season. Army has yielded 10 goals in two Patriot League tournament games, and the Surdick-led group hasn’t wasted a second this week staying on point --- as a flustered Loyola learned Friday.

“We had some great individual efforts that made everything contested,” Alberici said. “I felt in every matchup, nobody was just able to see what was happening. They had to pay attention to the guy who was playing them. … Even if there are some gaps or some holes, because they’re under a little bit of duress we were able to hold up. In the times we didn’t, I thought A.J. was terrific.”