A boys’ basketball season to remember still lingers at Tamaqua.

It was a season suspended in midair, with no closure, last hurrah, or final “true number.”

The 2019-20 season was cut short because of the coronavirus pandemic, even as the Blue Raiders still found themselves alive in the PIAA Class 4A playoffs.

Seeing how the 2020-2021 has plenty of unknowns, Tamaqua coach Jim Barron is just as unsure about what this edition is going to look like.

Barron calls it “a total rebuild” with 11 departing seniors included among those leaving due to graduation or the virus.

All this while his squad was in the midst of driving forward in the state tournament and ended at 21-8.

“To look back on last year, it was an amazing run that we had,” Barron said with delight, but unsure where it really could have ended.

“To look back on it now is heartbreaking for (those) seniors. We knew this was a special class who was going to compete and leave their mark, and we put it all together and were playing our best basketball at the right time.”

Barron signaled out one big hurdle a season ago brought: garnering a win in the state PIAA tournament.

“That was something we had not done in 37 years, so to accomplish that was huge for the program,” said Barron, whose team defeated both Danville and Susquehanna Township in the state tournament. “Then we took it a step further and won our second-round game, and I really think we had a good matchup (against Pope John Paul II) for our quarterfinal game.

“It was so long since Tamaqua had that success on the court, I just wish we could have finished making history instead of the question of ‘what could have been’ always staying on that season.”

The 2019-2020 grads are going to weigh extremely heavy on the 2020-2021 season. Of those departing players, there was Barron’s son Brayden Knoblauch, the Raiders’ gunslinger who scored over 1,000 career points and averaged 17.55 points per game.

Also gone is Lucas Gregoire, a mountain of a man who rebounded and played bigger than his 6-5 frame and finished as the team’s second-leading scorer at 17.28 ppg.

There were other key losses, such as gifted athlete Nate Boyle (5.34) and steady Barron Stauffenberg (7.68), along with the wheeler-and-dealer point guard Nicko Bolletino (4.0).

What is going to be impossible to replace are the 151 3s the collective group converted. Knoblauch fired in a whopping 79 treys; Stauffenberg buried 29, Gregoire 21 and Bolletino 22 of the team’s total 188.

So, who lines up and steps up this time around? There is one pure returnee in junior Nate Gregoire with his 15.3 points per game and leadership. He is the club’s ‘big’ at 6-0, and can also play small forward.

Losing two 1,000-point scorers (Knoblauch and Lucas Gregoire) isn’t easy to replace, nor is the experience.

“Besides Nate we have Brady Sherry, Luke Verta and Joey Coleman back,” Barron said. “This summer was supposed to be the year we put in a lot of work to figure out our new identity and get these younger players comfortable with our system. The restrictions we had didn’t allow us to accomplish that. This preseason has been completely different from any other as we’ve had.”

The loss of so many leaders and lack of ‘true lettermen’ will mean a constant redo as the season unfurls and the names change with each passing game.

“We still don’t have a set (varsity) roster” Barron said. “To be honest, that may not be settled until the last practice before our first game. We have given these young players a lot to handle over the past (two preseason weeks), and some of them are just starting to feel comfortable with our system.”

Yet, Barron knows the pieces of the puzzle may not come together until the New Year is whistled in, and it may not be until late January when Tamaqua gets to the level the coach wants his team to play at.

“We are going to grow a lot over the course of the season, but we need to figure our pieces out very quickly, as games are approaching quickly,” Barron admitted.