As No. 12 Loyola warmed up Sunday for its first game in 11 months, it felt the sort of anticipation anyone would entering this season.
Also notable was what it didn’t have: About half of its roster, since only one bus arrived on time to take the Greyhounds to No. 17 Richmond that morning.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” coach Charley Toomey said of the prelude to his team’s 8-7 victory. “Even the Richmond kids were looking across like, ‘They’ve got to be kidding us. They brought 22 kids?’ It was crazy. … Welcome to 2021. After 2020, nothing will surprise me anymore.”
It was a last-second problem no one would have accounted for on their pregame checklist even in the pandemic era. Toomey even passed both of the team’s buses on his drive into campus. Except one of them had skidded on the ice and hit a pole on Interstate 83 in Baltimore and had to be replaced by the bus company Loyola uses.
That left Toomey with some hard decisions at 7:30 a.m., less than six hours before faceoff.
“I said, ‘I hate to do this fellas, but the first and second midfields, the first attack, the first close defense, the first rope unit, a third short stick, [faceoff man] Bailey [Savio] make sure you’re on there, two goalies,’ and we went down with a skeleton group just in case they made us start,” Toomey said. “It’s not the right message you want to send the team in game one, but when the cavalry got in there and everyone was together again, you sense that energy that we needed all over the field.”
It happened later than Loyola would have liked — the rest of the team jogged onto the field right as the national anthem played and didn’t get in any warmups. Nonetheless, the Greyhounds took an early lead before both defenses largely took over.
Loyola did an admirable job in one-on-one matchups and held down Richmond stars Richie Connell (one goal) and Ryan Lanchbury (two assists). The Spiders’ defense was just as stingy; through 56 minutes, Loyola’s starting attack of Kevin Lindley, Aidan Olmstead and Peter Swindell combined for one goal and one assist on 10 shots.
Yet Lindley helped rally the Greyhounds, pulling them within 7-6 with 3:18 to go before scoring a transition goal to tie the score with 66 seconds remaining. He completed the natural hat trick in overtime to secure the victory.