Jack Alesi was surprised when his team got off to a 6-0 start this season.

It wasn’t that he didn’t think Xaverian was a quality team, having a pair of seniors like Levance Fields and Saiquon Stone made it difficult to believe otherwise. Still, the coach didn’t expect an undefeated beginning because of the level of competition the team faced – especially in a December tournament in Hawaii.

“That was definitely surprising,” said Alesi, whose Xaverian team faced Monsignor Farrell in a CHSAA AA quarterfinal game last night at St. Francis Prep. Defending champion St. Raymond met Christ the King in an earlier quarterfinal matchup to advance to Sunday’s semifinals at St. John’s.

“But I’ve learned that there are a lot of surprising things about this team,” Alesi added.

Over the course of the year, Alesi also learned that he shouldn’t expect to anticipate anything the Clippers did.

“After we got out like that, I thought we might be in for a really big season,” Alesi said. “But not everything went according to plan.”

Indeed, the Clippers battled sickness, injury and just plain inconsistent play, and their season quickly turned sour. At one point, Xaverian lost seven of eight games.

A repeat trip to Fordham for the city finals seemed virtually out of the question. But Alesi never lost faith in his team and when Fields, who will play at Pittsburgh in the fall, returned from an ailment last month, everything changed.

“He was different,” Alesi said of the dynamic point guard. “He got what he was supposed to do.”

Fields’ improved play sparked a Xaverian resurgence and it happened as fast as the downward spiral had in January.

“I kept saying that the regular season games were just a way for us to prepare for the playoffs,” Alesi said. “Sometimes, it’s hard to understand that, but I knew if we could turn it around in time, we would be fine.”

Lately, the Clippers have been better than fine. Fields and Stone propelled Xaverian to a mild upset of Holy Cross in the Brooklyn/Queens Sectional semifinals and then knocked off an improved Bishop Loughlin squad in the title game.

That victory gave Xaverian one of the two top seeds in the intersectional playoffs, which continue today at Archbishop Molloy, when Rice plays Holy Cross and Loughlin meets All Hallows.

“We never lost faith,” said Fields, who has lately lived up to his reputation as perhaps the top player in the city. “Other people probably did because we lost all those games in a row. But we knew we had the talent to turn it around, it was just a matter of when.”

As it turned out, that happened just in time.