TOWSON, Md. — The postseason has a way of changing the coaching calculus for Maryland’s John Tillman. Maybe it’s a personnel change. Perhaps it’s a more aggressive approach than on a random Saturday in March.

And sometimes, it goes in the exact opposite direction, as it did Sunday in the first round of the NCAA tournament at Towson. Down a goal, the Terrapins were content to play it conservatively and permit the Tigers run out the shot clock with 23.8 seconds to go. Then Jared Bernhardt smoked a Kyle Long feed past goalie Tyler Canto with 3.7 seconds left to force overtime.

“We rolled the dice a little bit,” Tillman said. “We knew we had 20-some odd seconds. We knew we had to go quickly.”

Louis Dubick then scored the game-winner off a Long pass with 2:21 left in overtime, securing Maryland’s latest postseason escape, a 14-13 victory and a date with third-seeded Virginia (14-3) in Saturday’s quarterfinals in Hempstead, N.Y.

“These are the ones that hurt the most,” Towson coach Shawn Nadelen said.

Logan Wisnauskas and Bubba Fairman both scored three times and Long — moved into a spot with the first midfield line — had four assists after not registering one since March 23 for the Terps (12-4), who improved to 8-1 in first-round games under Tillman.

Brody McLean and Brendan Sunday both scored four times for the sixth-seeded Tigers (11-5), who took the lead with a three-goal spurt capped by Sunday’s charge from behind the cage with 1:50 to play and were well-positioned to reach the quarterfinals for the third time in four years before Maryland’s comeback.

“We preach that in regard to defense finishing the game,” Nadelen said. “We knew we had to make a stop at the end of the game to finish it off.”

The in-state schools were annual rivals from 1981 until Tillman dropped the then-struggling Tigers to bolster his program’s strength of schedule after the 2011 season. This was their first meeting since then, and Maryland and Towson proceeded to pack about a decade’s worth of subplots into the afternoon, starting with some of Tillman’s personnel choices.

There was Long, an intriguing freshman playing more with the first midfield than he had all season and doing a good chunk of his work from behind the cage. Senior defenseman Thomas O’Connell, a converted short stick defensive midfielder, made his first career start in place of Jack Welding. Senior Wesley Janeck, he of the 18 career faceoff attempts entering the day, took the last 10 against Towson maestro Alex Woodall.

Former Terp Timmy Monahan had a goal and three assists against his old team. Fairman and exceptional Towson short stick Zach Goodrich had a fierce back-and-forth, the sort of matchup that would have commanded even more attention on most days.

In this one, it was merely a sliver of a never-boring afternoon that began with Woodall’s return after missing three games with a broken jaw.

The senior’s results — 22 of 31 — were nearly in line with his .745 faceoff percentage for the season.

“He’s a warrior,” Nadelen said. “He shouldn’t have been out there, but he chose to be out there. He wasn’t going to let his senior year not end on his terms. For everything he did for himself and for his team, he was going to do everything he could to have an impact today and he did.”

With Towson controlling possession for extended swaths of the first half and a few stretches afterward, Maryland needed fifth-year senior Danny Dolan to deliver one of his best games.

He complied, spreading 13 saves over the first three quarters and wrapping up the afternoon with 15.

“Fifteen saves, that’s just insane,” defenseman Curtis Corley said. “Even in the clearing game, he’s doing exactly what he needs to do. He’s getting the ball to the right guy. I feel like at times he really bailed us out.”

Towson, ever patient and but not as efficient as the Terps, was nonetheless on the verge of finishing off Maryland early. The Tigers led 7-3 with four minutes left in the first half, but Wisnauskas and Fairman both scored before the break to bring the fortunate Terps within two.

Maryland had scored a combined 10 goals after halftime in its last three games, including dramatic fades in back-to-back losses to Johns Hopkins. There wouldn’t be a similar showing this time; the Terps would tie it at 8, cede two goals and then rattle off four consecutive scores to seize a 12-10 advantage.  

“There was no doubt we were going to keep plugging and make some plays and get the thing back,” Tillman said. “Would we win? I [didn’t] know, but we were just telling the defense to hang in there, because their formula is very similar to Hopkins — long possessions, grind us down, grind and grind and grind. … I felt we were fighting uphill all game long because Alex is so good in the middle of the field.”

Towson wasn’t finished, methodically surging with goals from Monahan, McLean and Sunday to make it 13-12. Woodall handed Towson possession again, and the Tigers were content to stand in the corner and let the shot clock elapse.

“We left them a little too much time on the clock and they came down and made a play, and that’s just how things go sometimes,” Sunday said.

Held without a point until the final 6:32, Bernhardt blistered one past Canto to finish with two goals and an assist. Towson got the first chance on offense in overtime, only to pass into a double team and have Maryland midfielder Roman Puglise snag possession and lead the clear.

A minute later, Dubick ignited a celebration as Maryland improved to 8-1 in one-goal NCAA tournament games under Tillman. The Terps have authored their share of great escapes this decade; there was the 2011 overtime quarterfinal upset of Syracuse, tense first-round home games against Cornell (2014) and Yale (2015) and gripping semifinal survivals against Johns Hopkins (2015), Brown (2016) and Denver (2017).

This one was as riveting — and, at times, as improbable — as any of them.

“I just thought the offense, when they got the ball, they knew exactly what they were doing,” Corley said. “They knew their looks. It was just getting the offense the ball was the tough part. … Our offense just canned the looks they had to can today.”

And now it’s off to the quarterfinals. An extra week for the Terps to be together, an extra chance for a team that snuck into the tournament to make something of its season, an additional six days for Tillman to tinker.

The calculus changes, but for Maryland, at least on this particular day, the results in May remain the same.