So that was that, Maryland had swept Duke, and we were rolling again. Right? Wrong. Turns out after that we would only win one more game (at Virginia) before selection Sunday. But it comes with the territory. We had the high (the sweep of Duke) so the low had to come sooner or later. That’s what you get rooting for a bipolar team, you don’t want to admit it, but you know that you’re going to lose two games to Clemson and there isn’t anything you can do about it. It hurts rooting for a team who is up and down because they always suck you into watching. You never know when they’re going to play amazing, or when they’re going to pack it in before the National Anthem. Seriously, I think this team set the record for most times making me say, “I missed
The OC for this?!”
After spending the next couple weeks living on the bubble, Maryland’s dreams of continuing its streak of 11 straight NCAA tournaments were swatted away with one block.
The North Carolina game wasn’t the last game of the schedule but it certainly ended Maryland’s season. It was one of those morale-crushing losses where teams simply don’t recover. They had played hard and stayed with a much better team for 39 minutes. If Maryland had won that game, they could have checked their mailbox the next day and found their invitation to the NCAA tournament. When Carolina won, I think we all knew that Maryland’s season was over, even though on the outside we presented a falsely optimistic outlook that all we had to do was beat Virginia Tech the next week, or win one game in the ACC tournament. I think deep down we knew that this team just gave everything they had left to win and they couldn’t do it.
So as the season comes to a close, I’ll remember that block as “the play that defines Maryland’s season.” Hopefully there will be a better moment that defines next season.
U of Maryland 