“It’s been a pretty cool experience. But honestly, there’s too much work to do this week and this season [to dwell on it],” said Little, who set school and Patriot League records with his monster effort, produced the biggest offensive game in Division I this season and was a rather obvious choice for the league’s Offensive Player of the Week honor.

“We feel like we’re building some momentum, and we’ve got to keep it going,” he said. “I don’t think 4-6 is a record of how good this team can be.”

With attackman Jack Ray figuring to play a substantial amount of minutes after returning last week from a foot injury that sidelined him for seven games, Navy (4-6, 2-3) will go after its third straight win, as the Mids try to contend for a top 4 seed in the league tournament.

For Little, the 9-for-9 day was gratifying on several counts. A year after missing nearly the entire season with a torn ACL, he was sidelined for two games earlier this season with a hamstring injury he suffered during Navy’s 13-7 win over Bucknell on March 4.

“I pulled up when we were riding, and I thought it was a cramp,” he said. “Then it got incredibly frustrating on the sideline. It was a ‘here we go again’ moment.”

On Saturday, it was Lehigh that was forced to live with a bunch of those moments. In hindsight, it was amazing how Little, who took advantage of assists on every goal, kept getting open inside.

“I know where the eyes are going in our offense, and you can tell where the soft spots are in a defense,” Little said. “I need to do it again this weekend.”

Nittanys Lions Excited for a Stack Big Ten

Up at State College, where Penn State continues to extend the best start in school history and is ranked No. 1 for the third consecutive week, Nittany Lions head coach Jeff Tambroni is all about perspective.

Are the Lions really as good as their 9-0 record suggests?

“Our guys are cautious and optimistic,” Tambroni said. “They’re realistic about what we’ve accomplished so far. We’ve learned a lot from last year’s team. We understand much more about managing expectations each and every week.

“We’ve established a mindset. We’re about yearning to get better each week. Our senior class has done a good job of creating a compass that’s been moving forward since August. We sprinkle in a dose of humility day in and day out. Nobody feels like we’ve arrived.”

The arrival of Big Ten conference play should keep Penn State in line. The conference posted a non-league record of 44-8, with five of those combined losses absorbed by Johns Hopkins and Maryland, whose always-nasty schedules reflect that number.

The entire conference remains ranked, including No. 9 Rutgers, which won its first eight games for the first time since 1955, before getting upset by Delaware last week.

The arrival of No. 7 Ohio State (9-1) at University Park on Sunday night – in one of the more unexpected, midseason marquee games one could have imagined six weeks ago – underscores the urgency of the tests that await the Nittany Lions, who have not beaten a team currently ranked.

The Buckeyes, off to their second-best start in program history, already have beaten No. 8 Denver and No. 15 Towson in the same week.

In Tambroni’s eyes, this year’s Penn State team, which last year limped home with an 8-7 record by suffering consecutive, one-goal losses in April against Maryland, Hopkins and Rutgers before getting walloped by the Terps in the Big Ten tournament semifinals, is simply a different animal.

It starts with the fact that three freshmen – attackman Mac O’Keefe, goalie Colby Kneese and faceoff specialist Gerard Arceri – have reinvigorated a squad featuring a 10-man senior class led by all-conference attackman and team captain Nick Aponte.

PHOTO BY MARK SELDERS

O’Keefe, the highly-touted recruit out of Syosset (N.Y.) who played on the U.S. U-19 team last summer, has been as good as advertised as a finisher. His 34 goals (on 43.6 percent shooting) lead the country. Aponte and sophomore Grant Ament each have fueled O’Keefe’s surge with 18 assists, while Ament has netted 21 goals on 49 percent shooting.

The Nittany Lions have won 69.8 of their faceoff attempts, largely because of Arceri, who has ignited the runs that have elevated the offense to fourth in Division I with an average of 15.33 goals per game.

Kneese (10.73 GAA, .514) beat out incumbent Will Schreiner for the job and has started all but one game. He has helped Penn State preserve one-goal wins over then-ranked Penn and Fairfield, and his 15 saves put away Harvard in a 15-12 victory.

Penn State might be the deepest at midfield ever under Tambroni, who has switched his top two lines back and forth in the rotation repeatedly, an approach that has yielded impressively balanced results. Sophomore Nick Spillane leads one group with 13 goals and 22 points. Senior Mike Sutton (16 points) leads the other group, with sophomore Kevin Hill (15 points) right behind him.

All signs point to a Big Ten that is capable of beating each other up in the coming weeks.

“[The conference] looks like a gauntlet of bluebloods and currently successful teams,” Tambroni said. “Balance and depth have been keys for us so far. We need more of that going forward. But I like where we are as a competitive group. Every day, whether it’s in practice or in games, we’re enjoying the moment and managing our expectations in the moment.”

Tambroni credits the Lions’ approach to Dr. Patricia Lally, a sports psychologist who has worked with the team since last fall. After last year’s late fade, Tambroni thought the Lions failed to handle the losing that snowballed.

“It took us two or three days to bounce back from the [overtime] loss to Maryland,” he said. “The next week, Johns Hopkins [with an overtime win] took advantage of a team that wasn’t prepared mentally.

“What Dr. Lally has done is reframe what ‘fear of failure’ means. Her point is that whether it’s through winning or losing, you should always embrace the opportunity to get better. I think that message has hit a home run with this group. But a lot more will be told in the next couple of months.”