Lehigh was eager to head into 2020 with the faceoff tandem of Conor Gaffney (then a senior) and Mike Sisselberger (then a redshirt-freshman). The former was established as one of the best players at his position in Division I. The latter was a highly regarded recruit. Both figured to play plenty.

Both won at least 60 percent of their draws, with Gaffney getting 62.6 percent of the work and Sisselberger handling nearly all the rest. It wasn’t an even split, but both players carried great value for the Mountain Hawks.

This season, with Gaffney taking advantage of an extra year of eligibility, the duo might be even more of a luxury — a fact already on display after Gaffney was held out of Saturday’s opener against NJIT because of COVID protocols.

“In a year like this, when you never know when somebody’s going to be in or out of the lineup, having them to be able to complement each other [is valuable],” Lehigh coach Kevin Cassese said. “If someone ends up getting put into quarantine or testing positive and going into isolation, to have the other one available is critical for our team’s success overall.”

Sisselberger was plenty effective while receiving the largest share of work in his college career. He won 16 of 22 draws in the 24-10 victory, and Cassese praised his decision-making.

“In the past, he’s really had kind of a one-track mind which was, ‘I’m going forward, and I’m going to try and score until someone stops me,’” Cassese said. “It was very telling early in the first quarter; he popped one forward and when he drew the point defenseman, threw it over to the point guy. We didn’t score, but it was the right play. It came back to help him later because he ended up scoring his first career goal when they didn’t slide to him that time, and he went down and stuffed it.”

Overall, Cassese was pleased with the opener given how little time the Mountain Hawks have had together on the field. Lehigh had one practice in the fall and was paused twice, once because of virus concerns within the team and once as part of a university-wide shutdown. The school mandated a late start to all spring semester activities, so preseason practice didn’t begin until Feb. 1.

Given those limitations, Cassese acknowledged he graded his team’s progress on something of a curve in February. March, which starts with a visit from Patriot League power Loyola on Saturday, is a different story.

“I’ve definitely been doing that up to this point and up to this week,” Cassese said. “But I don’t think we can afford to do that anymore because the curve gets elevated now just by our opponent. Loyola doesn’t care about what kind of curve we’re working on. They just care what curve they’re working on, so we have to elevate that.”