Ten minutes into the second half of Sunday night’s NCAA tournament third-round match against UC Irvine, the Terrapins men’s soccer team clung to a one-goal lead.

After a sluggish first half on both sides of the ball, the Anteaters emerged from halftime with an aggressive offensive formation and shifted an extra midfielder forward to provide another attacker. Coach Sasho Cirovski said the Terps defense initially struggled to adjust to the change, and the Anteaters almost capitalized on the strategy on a number of occasions.

Goalkeeper Zack Steffen eagerly awaited the challenge, though.

With 32:33 remaining in regulation, forward Enrique Cardenas collected the ball at the top of the box, but the Terps backline failed to pick him up. With space in front of him, Cardenas took two touches before connecting on a left-footed bullet that appeared to be on a direct path to the top left corner of the net. Steffen followed it all the way, though, diving and extending his hand at the last second to tip the ball over the crossbar.

“As a goalie, you want to be a fire preventer,” said forward Patrick Mullins, who scored the match’s lone goal in the 32nd minute. “You want to see what’s going to happen before it does, and I think he puts himself in great positions to make those saves. And obviously, he’s got great athletic ability and reactions to be able to make those saves.”

With just more than four minutes remaining in the match, forward Lester Hayes III broke free from his defender in the box and fired a point-blank header on cage, but Steffen was there again, making a quick reaction save to preserve his fourth shutout in five postseason matches.

“He’s good,” Anteaters coach George Kuntz said. “Even the DVDs that we have on that guy don’t give him credit.”

Kuntz said Steffen’s performance Sunday night was as much about the little things as it was about the game-saving stops. The coach told his players before the game to send crosses into the middle in an effort to pull Steffen out of the goal and potentially cause the freshman goalkeeper to slip up — something he struggled with early in the season.

Kuntz’s tactics proved futile, though. Steffen, who made five saves in the match, was assertive and confident on balls in the air for the full 90 minutes, thwarting a number of threatening crosses from UC Irvine attackers.

“It really settles a team when you have that much confidence in your goalkeeper,” Kuntz said. “If you’re in the backline or midfield and you see guys picking balls out of the air like that, he did a pretty good job.”

Steffen’s development and transition into Division I soccer has not been an easy process, however. Through the first seven games, the freshman sported a 1.81 goals-against average, ranking him outside the top 150 goalkeepers in the nation.

Yet Cirovski never wavered from Steffen — who won a preseason competition against three older goalkeepers for the starting position — and in the past 16 games of the season, the freshman has allowed just 13 goals, compiled eight shutouts and improved his goals-against average to a respectable 1.11, which ranks 76th in the country.

Many of Steffen’s early season struggles resulted from his health. The Downingtown, Pa., native took two and a half months off this summer nursing an injury and admitted he was still rusty during the Terps’ opening slate. After Steffen returned to form, though, Cirovski said he started to show signs of improvement with each practice and game.

The freshman pointed to Mullins as a main reason for this growth.

“It’s hard to move up into the college level, and Pat here has taken everybody underneath his wing,” Steffen said. “He’s helped us out a lot. He always is positive, and it always helps us even when we’re playing bad or in the negative times.”

Steffen’s shutout against the No. 12-seed Anteaters propels the No. 5-seed Terps to a quarterfinal matchup at No 4-seed California on Saturday afternoon. The game will be a rematch of the Terps’ 3-2 road loss against the Golden Bears on Sept. 1, which ended when Steffen mishandled a shot in overtime, leading to an easy rebound goal.

This time around, though, Cirovski said California can count on Steffen being at the top of his game.

“We knew we had a special goalkeeper when we recruited him, but he’s an even better person,” Cirovski said. “And because of that character, he’s shown tremendous strides and growth throughout the season to now where I wouldn’t trade him for anyone in the country.”