COLLEGE PARK, Md. — Attackmen Joey Epstein and Kyle Marr lingered near the stands behind the bench Saturday night. With a dash of impatience, coach Dave Pietramala glared from the other side of the field, greeting his players as they straggled to the locker room.

Epstein and Marr had already helped Johns Hopkins drill Maryland 16-11 in a season-saving triumph. They had savored hoisting the wooden crab trophy symbolizing supremacy of the in-state rivalry. They had seen the stadium lights flicker a bit, and soon Pietramala sent a staffer to collect his starters.

Epstein, who scored four goals and added two assists in the rout, had one last crowd-pleasing moment to cap his first Hopkins-Maryland game. He jogged away from the stands at Maryland Stadium, then turned around and lobbed a ball toward those fans who remained of the announced 12,405 in attendance before dashing diagonally to the locker room.

Pietramala soon imparted the night’s real lesson: The Blue Jays can’t stop there.

“This is an experience they should enjoy, but for right now, there’s more important things,” Pietramala said. “The last thing I want is them to see our guys celebrating. We need to put it in our back pocket and move on. Coach [Bill] Belichick always says, ‘On to Maryland.’ You know what? That’s the way we’ve got to be.”

Yes, the Blue Jays get another taste of the Terrapins on Thursday in Piscataway, N.J., a Big Ten semifinal Hopkins (7-6, 3-2) could effectively use to lock itself into the postseason. And it will come after the Blue Jays crammed a season in miniature into seven days, a wild sequence in a spring filled with them.

Pietramala is the first to acknowledge he’s faced a bit of a tug-of-war with this team. When Hopkins won the Big Ten tournament and reached the NCAA quarterfinals last year, it had tested anchors on defense (goalie Brock Turnbaugh) and on offense (Shack Stanwick and Joel Tinney) to lean on.

The search for similar figures has loomed —  maybe it still does —  in 2019. The Blue Jays have attempted to fit players into roles they’ve never been asked to take on, whether it’s a freshman like Epstein who’s new to it all or a senior like Marr who was never the focal point in the past.

Hopkins seemed to turn a corner with an April 6 defeat of Rutgers, but squandered a second-half lead in a one-goal loss to Ohio State, then got pulverized 20-9 at Penn State. It was anyone’s guess what response it would muster in a short week.

“We hit the reset button after the loss to Penn State, and I think that was the best thing for this team,” defenseman Patrick Foley said. “Our biggest thing was to get back to the defense we played last year —  loose, coming in with confidence. And although we didn’t start that way this game and we were down early, that almost helped us loosen up a little bit and say, ‘There’s only one way out of this, and that’s if we fight and trust each other.’”

It wasn’t just getting out of a season teetering on the precipice of entering the Big Ten tournament in an all-or-nothing scenario. It was finding a way to climb out of a 5-1 hole punctuated when Maryland’s Roman Puglise delivered a man-down goal less than 10 minutes into the game.

Yet Hopkins scored the next three. It responded to a Terrapin goal with five in a row heading into halftime. And when Maryland showed a hint of verve on a Bubba Fairman goal to open the third quarter, Hopkins rattled off three more goals to seize a 12-7 lead.

So what exactly changed?

“Defensively, we stopped being selfish,” Pietramala said. “That’s been our Achilles’ heel all year long. We’ve shown the propensity to be able to play good, solid defense. … In the first 12 minutes, we were selfish. We were late sliding to Fairman with a short stick on him. How’s that possible? We talked about that all week.”

And at the other end?

“We finally shared the ball,” Pietramala said. “We’ve been holding the ball too long — 8, 9, 10 seconds at a clip. Today we moved, and we let the ball do the work for us a bit.”

After beating Maryland, well, it's onto Maryland. @jhumenslacrosse has only so long to savor Saturday night's 16-11 triumph in College Park. Round Two of #TheRivalry looms Thursday: https://t.co/wy0qikbfD6 pic.twitter.com/r7FQ26O7jC

— US Lacrosse Magazine (@USLacrosseMag) April 28, 2019

To be clear, it wasn’t a crisp day for the Terps (11-3, 3-2). Maryland took only 21 shots, including a mere eight in the middle two quarters. It snagged 19 ground balls. And it never got traction after its early burst, scoring consecutive goals just once in the last 50 minutes.

It added up to the Terps’ most lopsided home loss since the 2013 NCAA tournament (a 16-8 setback against Cornell) and their least competitive showing at home against Hopkins since a 13-3 pounding in 1999.

“They did a really good job in the middle of the field,” defenseman Curtis Corley said. “They beat us up on the ground balls. Right there in the second quarter, they had 10 ground balls and we only had four. That’s kind of disappointing on my part. I felt like we could have done better on the ground and just played a little bit more Terp lacrosse. They outdid us tonight.”

Hopkins played its part, and maybe the Blue Jays have finally uncovered, if not a blueprint, then an outline for how to make something of this season beyond a months-long dance with .500.

Pietramala expects a better version of Maryland on Thursday at Rutgers, and wasn’t about to suggest a comparable effort in Round Two would produce a comparable outcome. Yet however erratic the Blue Jays have been —  everything between rallying to beat Princeton and North Carolina on the road, and getting clobbered at Towson and Penn State — perhaps something new floated to the surface Saturday.

“We’ve been selfish far too much and far too long this season,” Pietramala said. “It’s been an ongoing battle that we’ve been fighting and I’ve been wrestling these guys with. I don’t think it’s an intentional thing, like, ‘I want to do this,’ but we’re doing it. When we do it, you see how poor we can look. I think you saw that for 20s-worth goals last weekend. I think you saw at moments tonight what I would view as a very positive step for this group.”

And it was a shaky step for the Terps, who didn’t face the same sort of desperation Hopkins did coming into the day. Maryland profiles as safely inside the NCAA tournament field. Yet it’s also given up a dozen goals in four of its last five games, its first such stretch since 1995.

Sometimes, it’s hard to take lessons from victories. It shouldn’t be a challenge to absorb something from a loss, especially with a rematch arriving just five days later.

“It’s going to be a good learning point for us,” Corley said. “Just lucky it’s not the end of our season and we can keep battling. We get that second shot at them. We’ll be ready.”

If Maryland’s situation was altered Saturday, Hopkins’ was not. Or at least it shouldn’t have been.

Sure, the Blue Jays should have stopped to savor the moment. But their work is far from finished.

“We understand we’re in a position we have to win out almost the rest of the season, and this game was a good step in the right direction, but next Thursday is even more important,” Foley said. “We’re going to see a new Maryland team, and they’re going to see a new [Hopkins] team.”