As they prepare to pursue another Colonial Athletic Association title and automatic NCAA tournament berth, the Towson University men’s lacrosse team has lost the steam it built up during one of the program’s better starts ever.

Back on March 4, the Tigers earned a No. 1 national ranking for the first time in their 40-year Division I history. Not long after opening the season with a smashing 17-8 rout of local rival Johns Hopkins, they had just knocked off top-ranked Loyola, marking Towson’s third victory ever over a No. 1 opponent.

Towson was soon to be 5-0 for the second time since 1992.

Three consecutive losses later, that early momentum is but a memory as the 5-3 Tigers, in the face of stout, nonconference scheduling and sloppy play, have slipped to 12th in the Nike/US Lacrosse Division I Men’s Top 20.

The first two defeats came against Cornell and Duke, each a top-five opponent. That was followed by Saturday’s painful, 7-6 setback against visiting, 10th-ranked Denver.

There is no question the Tigers, who open CAA play against Hofstra on Saturday, are concerned. Their clearing game has been notably suspect on good days. Their turnover issues and scoring droughts have persisted during the losing streak. Those marks have negated the terrific work of senior faceoff star Alex Woodall, who on March 9 became Major League Lacrosse’s top draft pick.

This much is also clear. There is no sense of panic among the Tigers, starting with Shawn Nadelen, their stern, soft-spoken, eighth-year head coach, and extending through a nine-man senior class that already has shared in too much achievement to be unnerved by some potholes in the road.

“We expect to win. We have that confidence. We don’t hold onto losses,” says senior All-American defensive midfielder Zach Goodrich, a four-year impact player and the third pick in the MLL draft. “We’re always trying to get better each week, even if things are going well. We’ll get straightened out.”

“We have to be smarter and cleaner. We’re too experienced to keep beating ourselves,” adds Nadelen, referencing the 20 turnovers against Denver and the 25 miscues that a week earlier turned a winnable game in Durham into a 12-10 loss to Duke. “We’ve been tested, challenged and exposed, against some really tough competition. We will correct what needs to be fixed. We’ve earned the right to think we can win any game we play. I know we can compete with anybody in the country.”

And why wouldn’t the Tigers — led by seniors such as Goodrich, Woodall, attackman Brendan Sunday, midfielders Timmy Monahan and Grant Maloof and defenseman Chad Patterson — feel that way?

Under Nadelen and eighth-year assistant coach Anthony Gilardi, Towson has built and maintained its mid-major brand impressively.

The Tigers have thrived on developing under-recruited players largely from their home state of Maryland. They are founded on discipline, tenacious defense and a blue-collar attitude. And they are as athletic as ever this year.

Towson also is taking aim at its fifth CAA title under Nadelen and its fourth conference title in the past five seasons.

“It comes down to having a blueprint,” says Gilardi, Towson’s offensive coordinator and a 2004 graduate of Ohio State. “We’re looking for the best available players who are tough, hard-working and really love to play lacrosse. We go after under-recruited kids with a chip on their shoulders. I always had one as a player. I got overlooked.”

No one is overlooking the Tigers anymore. Towson has become a tough out over the course of their four previous NCAA tournaments dating to 2013, Nadelen’s second year as head coach. Nadelen replaced Tony Seaman after spending seven years under him as an assistant.

In 2016, when most of their current seniors were Towson freshmen — Woodall transferred from High Point after that season, Monahan from Maryland a year later — the Tigers won a program-record 16 games.

The signature victory came at No. 2 seed Denver, where Towson stunned the defending NCAA champs 10-9 in the first round of the NCAAs to earn its first quarterfinals trip under Nadelen.

A year later, behind seniors and longtime starters Joe Seider, Ryan Drenner, Jack Adams and Tyler Mayes, the Tigers one-upped themselves. Towson eliminated second-seeded Syracuse, 10-7 in the quarterfinals at the Carrier Dome to advance to the program’s third final four and first since 2001.

The Tigers ended their season by losing an 11-10 semifinal heartbreaker to Ohio State. Nadelen, later named the USILA Coach of the Year, said goodbye to the most accomplished senior class of his tenure.

Towson returned one of its more inexperienced teams under Nadelen in 2018. And the Tigers had no idea how far last season would veer off script. After a midseason incident rocked the Tigers internally, Towson wound up at 7-8 and missed the postseason.

The trouble happened during a road trip to Denver, where the Tigers dropped an 11-10 decision in overtime on March 24. Following a violation of team rules that occurred during the team’s flight home, Nadelen’s reaction was swift and sharp.

Nadelen suspended junior starting attackman Jon Mazza and senior starting defenseman Sid Ewell. Redshirt junior reserve attackman Dylan Kinnear, a transfer from Ohio State, was dismissed from the team.

Mazza would never see the field again for Towson. He received his transfer release last August. Ewell, after being kicked off the team bus as the Tigers were about to depart for their next game — a 9-3 drubbing at Hofstra — would serve a two-game suspension.

The Tigers reeled initially, as their record fell to 3-6 at Hofstra. Nadelen, who prides himself on coaching disciplined teams, reassessed his own leadership, as the Towson staff honed their focus on the locker room leaders, or lack thereof.

“That’s the more sobering piece we learned from,” Nadelen says. “We understand more as coaches that we need to be better at developing our younger guys as leaders. We lost a lot of leaders in that [Class of 2017]. We probably tolerated more than we should have [last year], and that falls 100-percent squarely on me.”

“I felt badly for last year’s team and last year’s seniors,” he adds. “It was a few guys who screwed it up for everybody. We had to strip things down and figure out where we were, in terms of sustaining our culture and defining our core values. We still had a good group of guys.”

The Tigers performed a difficult balancing act last spring.

In the short term, they reshuffled their offensive lineup by moving Monahan to midfield and Sunday to attack and giving more prominent roles to midfielder Matt Sovero and attackmen Johnny Giuffreda and Luke Fromert.

The Tigers recovered well enough to come close to making their fourth straight NCAA tournament.

In the bigger picture, Nadelen’s staff decided to form a leadership council among players of all classes, so as to give the Tigers more of a self-policing hand in running things.

That group took root last fall. It consists of seniors and co-captains Goodrich, Sunday, Woodall and Jimmie Wilkerson; junior Brody McLean and Sovero, a redshirt junior; sophomores Koby Smith and Andrew Beacham; and freshman Jack Kimmel and redshirt freshman Greg Ey.

“Talk about being in a bunker,” Gilardi says. “We met so many times as coaches and with players that we got tired of meeting. We were drawing up new offenses and defenses, trying to teach the guys a lesson about leading through adversity and maximizing what we could do on the field.”

“I think it would have been tough for any team to bounce back right away after [the suspensions],” Woodall says. “But eventually, we figured it out.”

The Tigers nearly did the remarkable. After the Hofstra loss, Towson rebounded by winning three of its next four to grab the No. 2 seed in the CAA tournament. The Tigers then beat Delaware in overtime but lost to UMass in the CAA final 12-8.

“Watching UMass raise that trophy fueled the fire for us, especially us juniors last year,” says Patterson, who had never before lost a CAA tournament game.

Goodrich says when the Tigers convened to start the fall season, the team was united and resolved to make sure everyone was doing things the right way. The leadership council met weekly, lifted weights together on practice-free Wednesdays, dined together and consulted with the coaching staff.

“It’s been great. It’s enabled us to tell how the team’s energy is going, among all of our classes,” Goodrich says. “How are the freshmen coping with being in college and the major schedule changes for them? How are the study halls? How are classes going for everyone?”

“We can breathe fire down [the players’] necks, but we’re not there with them side-by-side,” Nadelen says. “They’re making the decisions about classes, about what happens on the practice field or how to handle being at the Greene Turtle on a Friday night.”

“We’ve got a strong senior class this year,” he adds. “Their communication and leadership have filtered down through the team, and our work ethic has been strengthened. When the players left for the summer, those [seniors] flipped a switch. For the most part, that switch has stayed on.”

“I expected us to be good. I expected us to win our first game [against Hopkins],” Woodall says. “But I was taken aback by how good we looked that day. We made a statement.”

With Woodall dominating faceoffs, the Tigers turned a back-and-forth affair with then-No. 7 Hopkins into a nine-goal rout — by far Towson’s biggest day in what has overall been a lopsided series, in favor of Hopkins. The Tigers, 6-41 all-time against the Blue Jays, have beaten Hopkins three times in their past five tries.

Eighteen days later, Towson never trailed against undefeated Loyola in a 12-10 win that marked only the third time the Tigers have bested both Charles Street rivals in the same season.

Then, the Tigers’ toughest non-conference schedule ever under Nadelen caught up with them.

“We feel like we’re going to be a tough out for anyone,” says Sunday, who leads Towson in goals (24) and points (37).

“This is the closest this team has been in my four years here,” Goodrich says. “We’ve got the energy and the culture back. We know what we want — to be playing on the last weekend in May.”