The Terrapins men’s basketball players wrapped their arms around one another inside the Spokane Veterans Memorial Arena tunnel, swaying back and forth. In the center, veteran guard Rasheed Sulaimon crouched and bounced around, occasionally locking eyes with one of his teammates.

“Who’s got my back?” Sulaimon screamed.

“We got your back!” the Terps replied in unison.

Sulaimon asked again. Same answer.

“Where my dogs at?” Sulaimon shouted the next time.

“Hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo,” the Terps said as they collapsed on Sulaimon and raised their arms together.

This scene has played out before each postseason Terps game, starting with the Big Ten quarterfinals March 11. The chant gets the team excited, but it also keeps them loose. Walk-on guard Andrew Terrell leads it two to three more times on game day.

“Just to get the troops ready,” Terrell said. “They love it.”

Sulaimon, a Houston native, said he fell in love with the show Friday Night Tykes, a reality television show about peewee football in Texas. While watching an episode, he noticed one of the teams perform the “Where my dogs at?” chant before a game.

“I just saw how the intensity, even though they were playing in a junior division football, the intensity that they had,” Sulaimon said. “So I tried to bring it to our guys.”

The Terps struggled in the final games of the regular season, losing four of their final six contests. For a team that spent most of the season ranked in the top five, it was a tough stretch.

Coach Mark Turgeon has preached the need to stay loose and have fun throughout the year. The chant lets them do that.

But the Terps weren’t sold on it initially. Forward Robert Carter Jr. was trying to talk in a huddle at one point, and Terrell butted in, “Where my dogs at?”

“I got kind of mad, like, ‘I’m trying to talk,'” Carter said. “And then he continued to do it. He’s that type of person. He’s not just going to stop because you tell him to stop.”

Soon, though, the phrase caught on. Even Carter found himself saying it.

“It just grew,” guard Trevor Anzmann said. “It grew on us.”

The Terps now have a routine built around the chant. Sulaimon leads it in the tunnel then cedes control to Terrell.

The leader of the bench mob does it twice more before the opening tip, once after the pregame stretch and once after the starting lineups are announced. The best time, though, comes in the locker room after wins.

Terrell gets to lead it for a third time.

“We all just get rowdy together,” Terrell said.

As the Terps forge ahead in their quest for the program’s second national title with a Sweet Sixteen bout against No. 1-seed Kansas on Thursday, they plan to continue the routine.

Maybe late Thursday night Terrell will be in the locker room in Louisville asking, “Where my dogs at?”

In the Elite Eight.

“Hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo.”