There are myriad words to describe the Terrapins men’s basketball team’s start at North Carolina on Tuesday night: messy, disastrous, a snafu, a boondoggle, a quagmire. All of those work, and all of those are appropriate.
The way the Terps have played this season, slow starts and road struggles are to be expected, but it seems safe to say no one expected the Tar Heels to jump out to a 19-3 lead about five minutes into the contest.
From there, the remaining 35 minutes seemed like a mere formality.
Sure, the Terps cut the lead to three in the first half and six with eight minutes left in the second half as the Tar Heels tried pull them back into it with plenty of mistakes, but it wasn’t enough. After all, it’s easier for a team to win games when it doesn’t spot the other team 16 before it even puts together consecutive baskets.
There are some positive takeaways from the game. The Terps hung with the Tar Heels at times in the second half, suggesting that if the first half had been even a wee bit closer, they could have gotten out of their final regular-season ACC matchup in Chapel Hill, N.C., with a victory.
Plus, the Terps didn’t allow their second half deficit to balloon into a 20-point blowout like at Pittsburgh and Florida State. There seemed to be some fight, no matter how abstract and hard to quantify that concept is, and against a mercurial opponent, the Terps seemed to have chances, no matter how slight, at an improbable comeback.
Of course, it wasn’t to be, and the Terps stumbled yet again to negate any progress made in the previous two wins and sap the momentum they seemed to be building entering a crucial and difficult four-game stretch.
It’s too late in the season for moral victories, and the season has been up-and-down enough that if the Terps haven’t found consistency now, they won’t find it until it’s too late.
The Terps were able to label parts of the 83-79 loss to Pitt on Jan. 25 as moral victories, but the stakes were different then. The Terps had lost three of their previous four games and were looking for any sort positive as January ended. They found it and carried it into a last-second win over Miami and a blowout victory at lowly Virginia Tech.
Tuesday was supposed to be the start of something new. The win over the Hokies was supposed to be the corner being turned, the monkey getting off the back, the weight lifting off the shoulders, whatever you want to call it. The Terps played free and easy in Blacksburg, Va., and it showed with their dunking exhibition down the stretch.
That was nowhere to be found against North Carolina, and the Terps are back at .500 in ACC play.
The conference is still a logjam, and it’s quite feasible that the Terps could finish anywhere from fifth or sixth to 10th, given the unevenness of most of the teams. Even finishing 9-9 in the league wouldn’t be a complete upset for the Terps.
But given the significant expectations on this team and its talented roster, Tuesday night became just another disappointment at the bottom of a long list growing longer by the week.
