NEW YORK — The Terrapins men’s basketball team grew up in recent weeks. After slogging through an up-and-down conference campaign, the young squad was finally figuring out how to battle through adversity.

Coach Mark Turgeon was enjoying his job once again. Players were focusing during games’ critical stretches. And the Terps were riding a three-game winning streak for the first time since early January.

But an inexperienced Terps team reverted to its old ways under the bright lights of Madison Square Garden last night. It coughed the ball up with regularity, struggled to ignite a stagnant offense and failed to squelch the opposition’s top player. That relapse handed the No. 2-seed Terps a 71-60 loss to No. 3-seed Iowa, halting an inspired NIT run in the semifinals.

“We didn’t handle the big stage well,” said Turgeon, whose team enters the offseason with its most wins since 2006-07. “I don’t know how we kept it close to be honest with you.”

The Terps just didn’t play smart enough to pull out the victory, Turgeon added. They allowed the Hawkeyes to convert 17 turnovers into 27 points, and committed a litany of ticky-tack fouls. Iowa hit 19-of-24 free throws, while the Terps connected on just 9-of-16 attempts from the charity stripe.

And it didn’t help that no player was able to truly complement center Alex Len’s solid 16-point, nine-rebound, six-block showing. Two of the Terps’ (25-13) top three scorers this season — forward Dez Wells and guard Nick Faust — shot a combined 36 percent from the field, while Iowa (25-12) star Roy Devyn Marble carried the Hawkeyes through pivotal stretches with a game-high 21 points.

“Everyone’s clicking around this time of the season, and it’s just about whose night it is,” Wells said as tears welled in his eyes. “That’s all I really have to say. It was just a tough loss for us.”

Turgeon’s squad jumped to an early 4-0 lead, but the Hawkeyes used four straight Terps turnovers to string together an 11-0 run. Iowa’s full-court press continued to frazzle them, and an Adam Woodbury putback gave the Hawkeyes a 13-point edge midway through the first half.

The Terps had tallied giveaways on nine of 20 possessions when they headed to the bench for the under-8 timeout. And those turnovers had accounted for more than 50 percent of Iowa’s points.

But they eventually settled down. With less than four minutes remaining before the break, the Terps started finding open lanes and locking down defensively. A 12-4 run to close the half cut the deficit to 38-33.

“They were ready and we weren’t,” Turgeon said. “But I thought we played incredibly hard. … We never quit.”

The teams traded blows much of the second half. The Terps met each Iowa rally with a spurt of their own, and managed to keep the game in single digits after a Jake Layman layup shaved the deficit to 58-50 with 6:19 left.

Unlike in recent weeks, though, the Terps never really threatened. They made it a five-point game twice within a 56-second span late in the game, but were ultimately unable to overcome the Hawkeyes’ unique combination of size and physicality. After a 3-pointer from guard Eric May extended Iowa’s lead to nine with a minute remaining, the Terps were forced to foul and wait for the final buzzer to seal their fate.

The Hawkeyes were unlike any team the Terps had faced this season, guard Pe’Shon Howard said. They switched between a zone and man-to-man throughout the game. The Terps — who may have been a bit rusty after a weeklong break — simply weren’t able to muster enough plays down the stretch to grab the come-from-behind victory.

And this time, there would be no opportunity to remedy tired problems. The Terps — the same squad that had shown so much growth over the past month — had allowed old faults to extinguish the season on the brink of a championship appearance.

“We just weren’t ourselves tonight,” guard Logan Aronhalt said. “We weren’t the team that we’ve been the past six or seven games, and we paid the price tonight.”

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