About seven minutes into the the Maryland men’s basketball team’s game against Stony Brook on Tuesday night, forward Michal Cekovsky and guard Dion Wiley knelt by the scorer’s table. The duo took the court to an ovation.

The 14,034 fans in the sparse pre-Thanksgiving crowd hadn’t seen Cekovsky since last March while he recovered from a preseason foot sprain. Wiley, who missed last year with a meniscus tear, also sat out Sunday against Towson with a stomach virus.

In that contest, the Terps bench contributions were almost nonexistent. Five backups combined for two points.

But Cekovsky and Wiley added a much-needed boost in their minutes against the Seawolves. After coach Mark Turgeon spent the preseason hyping his team’s depth, the Terps proved their versatility in the 76-63 win.

“We’re a deep team,” Turgeon said, “and we haven’t been.”

While the sixth-year coach wasn’t sure the pair would play Tuesday, Cekovsky and Wiley wasted little time flashing their contributions.

Cekovsky had spent the summer working on his explosiveness and defensive range, staying in College Park for workouts instead of returning to his Kosice, Slovakia, hometown. He had grown frustrated in limited practice time since then, first battling a hamstring injury and then the foot ailment.

Turgeon estimated after the game Cekovsky had practiced about 10 times, aside from yesterday’s relaxed session, since late August.

But his offseason efforts shined when he swatted a Stony Brook shot away on his first defensive look as a junior. In transition, guard Melo Trimble then hit Wiley, who missed his first five three-pointers of the campaign, for a trey.

They weren’t done.

Wiley lobbed the ball to Cekovsky for an alley-oop two possessions later, and Cekovsky converted two more in the second half. The first drew a technical foul for hanging on the rim. The second left him barreling down the court, pounding his chest and evoking flashbacks of former star Greivis Vasquez’ celebrations.

The 7-foot-1, 250-pound forward apologized to Turgeon and his team for the penalty, but he shouldn’t feel guilty for his emotion.

“It’s my first time seeing him get that hype,” Wiley said.

Trimble, meanwhile, felt a similar energy from Wiley.

Last Friday morning, Wiley and Turgeon worked together to fix the redshirt sophomore’s shooting mechanics. He redeveloped a habit of keeping his left thumb on the ball too long, which contributed to his 2-for-8 shooting through three outings.

When Wiley sank his first long ball off the sequence from Trimble, the star knew his roommate was in a groove.

“Once he got that first one down,” Trimble said, “I just told him, ‘It’s time now.'”

The Oxon Hill native connected on his first four attempts from beyond the arc and finished with 13 points, second to Trimble.

He returned to the bench with Cekovsky in the waning moments of the game. Cekovsky had just fouled out, a knock on his post defense Turgeon wants to see improve with more experience.

As the junior grabbed a towel and water bottle, leaning back in his chair, Wiley reached over for a high-five.

“I’ve been seeing them play in the summer and just in pick-ups, and they’ve really just been shining,” Trimble said. “To see what they could do was really special.”