Sasho Cirovski isn’t afraid to schedule tough. In August and September, his Terrapins men’s soccer team routinely goes through a meat grinder of matchups with national implications, bringing NCAA tournament teams to Ludwig Field, taking West Coast road swings or playing mid-major teams with a variety of styles.

In Cirovski’s 21 years as coach in College Park, it’s a system that’s worked. When the No. 5-seed Terps take on No. 8-seed Virginia at PPL Park in Chester, Pa., tonight, it will be the Terps’ eighth College Cup appearance in the past 16 years, and they’ll be going for their third national championship since 2005.

But after the first few weeks of this season, it seemed like the strategy backfired. The Terps gave up six goals in two games at Stanford and California and then suffered a rare and shocking home collapse to Virginia Commonwealth on Sept. 8 to fall to 1-2-1.

Through five games, the Terps were 1-2-2 and had surrendered 12 goals, the quickest they had let up that number since a 1992 season in which the team went 5-12 and 0-5 in the ACC. A host of freshmen playing major minutes was struggling to adapt to the college game, and the team floundered down the stretch of major games.

Those were uncharacteristic issues for the Terps, and — especially after coming off a season in which they cruised to the College Cup with only minor hiccups late in the regular season — the Terps seemed to be in danger of missing the NCAA tournament for the first time since 2000, when the postseason was only 32 teams.

But the Terps are playing tonight after recording six shutouts in the final 10 games as the second-highest seed remaining on college soccer’s final weekend. Their run of dominance didn’t start until late and had its share of hurdles, yet they still came together.

“Every year has been kind of in its own way a special story with our team, and I think this year we knew we could get off to a tough start,” Cirovski said Wednesday. “I remember sitting with my assistant coaches, even in Cal after winning only one tie out of two games, I felt pretty good. I felt that’s what this team needed. Last year, it almost came too easy. 14-0-1, we’re scoring goals in bunches, and with a college team, sometimes it’s difficult to keep them at a high level and keep learning through victories.”

Last season, the Terps came out flat against Georgetown in the semifinals in Hoover, Ala., falling behind by two goals early, only to have their epic comeback fall short in penalty kicks. That senior class — midfielder John Stertzer and defenders London Woodberry and Taylor Kemp, all of whom signed professional contracts after the season — had never been to a College Cup and were in danger of becoming the first class in almost 15 years to not make it to the final weekend.

Perhaps too much was made of the Terps getting to Hoover instead of what they needed to do when they finally got there. Either way, the Terps learned from last year’s heartbreak in Hoover and are determined to avoid the same pitfalls in Chester.

“I think we have the approach this week that it is an ordinary game,” forward Patrick Mullins said. “Maybe a little too much last year was about getting to the College Cup because that group of seniors and nobody else on that team had been there, so it was very special to get there. It always is special to get there, but I think our approach this week in the trainings we’ve had so far and we will again today is another week at work and this is another one where we want to get better every day and making sure we’re doing things the right way.”

In a minor league baseball press box-turned-interview room last December, Cirovski and Mullins sat under dim lights and said they would be back to the College Cup this year. At the time, it seemed like a reasonable proclamation, but it faded slightly after losing defender Jordan Cyrus (eligibility exhausted) and forward Christiano Francois (ineligibility) and then even more after the team’s rough start.

Under the weight of Cirovski’s expectations and challenges, it appeared the Terps had wilted.

Yet here they are.

“This team has shown resiliency over the year,” Cirovski said. “The number of times we’ve had to come back and tie, the number of times we’ve come back and won has been remarkable.”

There are some parallels between Cirovski’s first two championship teams in 2005 and 2008 and this team. All three teams had West Coast road trips early in the season. All three teams started freshman goalkeepers on college soccer’s biggest stage. And they all got breaks down the stretch.

“It’s pretty special,” Cirovski said. “We’ve got a lot of gym rats that love each other and they love playing with each other and they want to keep playing, and I want to make sure we’re playing on Sunday.”