Looking back, Zach Triner’s life would be very different if it weren’t for Brian Brecht.

Brecht, currently at Rutgers, was the head coach at Siena from 2007-11, the last of which was Triner’s freshman season as a faceoff specialist with a full lacrosse career ahead of him.

Brecht left for Rutgers after that 2011 season, prompting Triner to reflect on his own future.

“When Coach Brecht left, it just gave me the opportunity to re-evaluate my life,” Triner told US Lacrosse Magazine. “If he was going to be intentional about his life, I was going to be intentional about mine.”

Lacrosse and football always competed for Triner’s affection as a youth growing up in Marshfield, Mass — “If you were to ask me in football season, it was football. In lacrosse season, it was lacrosse,” he said of his favorite sport — but football proved the stronger pull at that time in his life.

Because Siena didn’t offer football (it dropped the sport in 2004 for financial reasons), Triner transferred back home to Division II Assumption College in Worcester. He played on the defensive line for three seasons, graduating in 2015.

On Sunday, he’ll play in the Super Bowl for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers as the team’s long snapper.

Triner’s path to the NFL wasn’t without struggle. He worked out for his hometown New England Patriots in 2015, the Jacksonville Jaguars and New York Jets in early 2016 and the Houston Texans later that year, but nobody offered him a contract.

He was signed to the Green Bay Packers practice squad in Dec. 2017 but was released less than a year later. He signed with the Buccaneers on Jan. 2, 2019 and finally got his shot. He made his NFL debut on Sept. 8, 2019.

But when his gridiron aspirations stalled just out of college, Triner sold mutual funds for Fidelity Investments. He trained before and after his day job to stay ready for when he would hopefully get his shot to stick in the NFL.

“You go to all these lacrosse camps, and they just say to work hard and do your best,” Triner said. “There’s always healthy skepticism about it. But if someone can look at my journey, they can say it’s really true.”

Long snapping didn’t necessarily come naturally to the 30-year-old Triner, who was listed at 225 pounds as a freshman at Siena, 245 pounds as a senior at Assumption and now 247 pounds with the Bucs.

He likened the position to facing off. A specialty job, long snapping involves hours and hours of practice at one extraordinarily specific area of the game — just like how he used to do his work on the lacrosse field.

“In lacrosse, my opportunity to get on the field was at the faceoff,” said Triner, who played midfield in high school. “And there are a lot of similarities between facing off and being a specialist in the NFL. You’re doing the same thing over and over.”

Triner still picks up his stick in the offseason, and he talks lacrosse with a Bucs trainer whose son is “a heck of player.” Triner went to his practices last year.

Prior to earning his chance in the NFL, Triner also coached eighth grade lacrosse and even won a championship. But he doesn’t follow college lacrosse as much as he once did. He did, though, know enough to ask the burning question of the lacrosse world at the time of this interview: Did TD Ierlan transfer to Denver yet?

No surprise he was interested in the faceoff guy.

Triner won a MAAC championship during his lone year at Siena, a season in which he won 52.1 percent (122-for-234) of his faceoffs. The atmosphere for the “championship game” on Sunday will be just a little different, though.

Now on a first-name basis with the likes of Tom Brady and Rob Gronkowski — an unthinkable twist in life when he was at Siena, he said — Triner will play on arguably the grandest stage in sports.

“I’ve been so blessed to be able to be in this position,” Triner said. “God has put me in this position for a reason, and it’s really to show that I am, in so many words, someone who scratched and clawed and fought to get this opportunity.”

For someone who’s followed his gut and persisted his entire career, he hopes that his role in the Super Bowl, even a traditionally subdued one as a long snapper, will instill hope in those striving toward dreams of their own.

“One day,” he said, “you could be playing in the Super Bowl.”