DURHAM, N.C. — Dez Wells idolized Duke while growing up in nearby Raleigh, N.C. The future Terrapins men’s basketball forward watched greats Shane Battier and Jay Williams, and reveled in the Blue Devils’ 2001 national championship run.

So Wells was hardly surprised Saturday afternoon when No. 1 Duke delighted a raucous crowd at Cameron Indoor Stadium with a near-flawless performance. The Blue Devils were coming off a 27-point embarrassment at Miami — their worst regular-season defeat since January 1984 — and were ready to send a message, to prove why they’re one of college basketball’s winningest programs.

“We were expecting them to come out really fired up and ready to play,” Wells said moments after the Terps fell, 84-64, for their fourth loss in six games. “And the way they played, they probably could beat any team in the nation.”

Yet the young Terps didn’t break easily. They hung close with Duke throughout the first half and entered the break trailing by single digits. The Blue Devils dictated the tempo of the game for much of the second half, running away with the rout before a national television audience.

The box score tells much of the story. The Blue Devils shot 52.4 percent from the field, and connected on 11-of-22 three-point attempts. They tallied just four turnovers, while forcing 14 Terps giveaways. And guard Rasheed Sulaimon’s career-high 25 points led five Duke starters in double figures.

The display proved too much for a Terps (15-5, 3-4 ACC) team still adjusting to the rigors of ACC play. Though coach Mark Turgeon’s squad used a sizable rebounding advantage to stay close in the first half, Duke (17-2, 4-2) relied on a dominant stretch from National Player of the Year candidate Mason Plumlee to pull away in the game’s crucial moments.

After Terps center Shaquille Cleare held him to three shots in the first half, Plumlee exploded for 15 points over the final 20 minutes. The Terps struggled to fight through screens on defense, and the Blue Devils’ eight-point halftime edge ballooned to 20 with 4:39 remaining.

By the time Plumlee slammed down a two-handed reverse dunk 77 seconds later, the Cameron Crazies were serenading the Terps with a chorus of “Don’t come back!” — an ode to this university’s November decision to join the Big Ten.

“I feel like they got momentum and we couldn’t get it back,” forward Charles Mitchell said. “So the last 15 minutes is what I’m going to focus on when I get home — what mistakes I made, what mistakes our team made — to help us get better for the last 15 minutes. But we played hard for the first 25.”

Slow starts have plagued the Terps on the road this season, a trend that seemed destined to continue at unforgiving Cameron Indoor.

And yet, there were the Terps responding to an early 10-4 deficit with a 9-2 run of their own. There were the Terps more than doubling the Blue Devils’ first-half offensive rebound total. And there was Mitchell, who scored eight points in three minutes over the first half, hitting a putback to give the Terps a 13-12 advantage about six minutes into regulation.

The lead was short-lived. Sulaimon hit four straight 3-pointers over a 2:44 span to give the Blue Devils a 27-18 edge midway through the first half. The freshman had 18 points — one shy of his then-career high — on a perfect 5-of-5 shooting from beyond the arc by halftime.

“With the way they shot the ball from three,” Wells said, “there’s no team in the country that would be able to stay with them.”

Of course, the Terps still had their chances. But they seemed to lose focus offensively down the stretch, often settling for contested attempts early in the shot clock. They hurried possessions and tallied costly giveaways. Duke outscored the Terps, 18-5, in points off turnovers on the day.

But Turgeon wasn’t too concerned with dwelling on his team’s shortcomings following the Terps’ first blowout loss of the season.

He noted his squad showed considerable improvement in a raucous environment, referencing its first-half shellacking at North Carolina a week earlier. He explained that the Terps, who started five underclassmen Saturday for the fourth-straight game, don’t have veterans like Plumlee or senior Seth Curry to help younger players acclimate to the college game.

And, above all else, he lauded Duke’s effort three days after suffering the worst defeat by a top-ranked team in 45 years.

“There’s a lot of positives,” Turgeon said. “I know it’s hard to say that when you look at the final score, but Duke never quit. They played 40 minutes of really good basketball.”

TERPS NOTE: Guard Seth Allen sat the entire first half for arriving late to a team meeting earlier in the week. The freshman scored two points on 1-of-2 shooting and registered zero assists during 10 second-half minutes.

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