After the Terrapin men’s basketball team’s lopsided loss against Clemson last week, coach Gary Williams looked at the Terps’ daunting upcoming schedule and found the silver lining in the opportunities it presented them.

“Everything is still there for us,” Williams said at the time. “We play enough good teams coming up that, if we can win some games in the stretch, it can put us in good shape. That’s what we’re going to talk about and go from there.”

It sounded a little like a rash display of bravado, but Williams looked like a genius Saturday when the Terps beat then-No. 3 North Carolina, setting up another huge opportunity to make the same statement Wednesday against No. 7 Duke.

Confidence last night was high; morale at Comcast Center was even higher; and even though the air was slowly let out of the balloon in the 78-67 loss, by the end of the night you really had to believe in this team again, no matter how many negative columns you may or may not have written about them.

But then you remember the schedule, and you can’t be so sure.

“We feel like we can play with anybody,” forward Landon Milbourne said. “We feel like we can win any game we play.”

And while those statements would have sounded extremely cliché a week ago, at this point Milbourne is absolutely justified.

The Terp team that took the floor Wednesday night was worthy of an NCAA Tournament berth, and would beat most teams in the country.

It’s just too bad the schedule had to break this way, and that the Terps didn’t have this kind of swagger when they were playing the lower-echelon ACC teams earlier in the conference season.

The Terps are playing their best basketball at what normally would be the perfect time of the season – except they had to play these juggernauts Williams was excited to face.

“We’re going to be tough the rest of the way,” Williams said. “I guarantee you.”

The Terps probably will be, but it may just be too late.

They gave a tremendous effort in an electric atmosphere at Comcast Center last night, and should be applauded for sticking around with Duke for as long as they did.

The Terps stood up to every Blue Devil challenge until the final minutes, putting a major scare into the same team that barely broke a sweat against the them only a month ago.

They pushed a top-10 team to its limit in a game – unlike the one against North Carolina – in which the Terps didn’t get most if not all of the breaks or bounces, and they certainly didn’t get all the calls.

They did it with Greivis Vasquez on the bench in foul trouble for the vast majority of the second half and with Sean Mosley limited by an leg injury.

If the Terps had played this well against Boston College, against Florida State and in the first game against Miami, Wednesday’s loss would have been just a minor speed bump in the Terps’ road to a sure NCAA appearance.

But now, the Terps still have their work cut out for them in their last three games. They have yet another top-15 team coming into Comcast next week in No. 13 Wake Forest on Tuesday, sandwiched between games at N.C. State and Virginia.

If the Terps play in their last three games like they last night, a tournament berth is still a possibility. But it’s a lot tougher than it has to be.

“Some of those games in the past, we could’ve won those games if we played as hard as we played against Duke,” guard Adrian Bowie said. “You have to think about that.”

Yes, you do. Because as inspiring a performance as last night’s was, the bottom line is the Terps still have some digging left to do to get out of the early season hole.

The hole may have gotten a little deeper, but at least now it looks like somebody handed them a shovel.

schimmeldbk@gmail.com