For Terps, an early exit

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TAMPA, Fla. -- It felt like a spring day outside the St. Pete Times Forum yesterday. Inside, though, there was an unsettling reminder of a mid-winter memory the Maryland basketball team thought was long since retired.

The fifth-seeded Terrapins reverted to some of the habits that cost them in the first half of the conference season, dropping a 67-62 ACC tournament game to 12th-seeded Miami to earn an earlier-than-anticipated flight back home.

Maryland (24-8) had its seven-game winning streak snapped by the league's last-place team in almost the exact same way the Hurricanes (12-19) upended the Terps at Comcast Center on Jan. 10. Miami controlled the offensive glass, forced its share of turnovers and capitalized on a zone defense Maryland was too impatient to work around until it was too late.

For their part, the Terps didn't back down from a harsh assessment of their performance in their first loss in more than a month.

"We just didn't play hard," freshman guard Greivis Vasquez said. "We didn't play our game. I don't think they're better than us. We weren't ready to play. We just didn't run our offense hard. We didn't rebound the ball well. It's just disappointing."

At one time this season, it would have fit perfectly in a pattern of inconsistent outings. But after Maryland strung together so many solid performances in a row -- so much so it was considered one of the pre-tournament favorites -- it is jarring only because it seems out of place.

The Terps struggled from the perimeter (3-for-18 on 3-pointers) and from the foul line (15-for-26). They were outrebounded 42-34 by an undermanned team, including yielding 19 offensive rebounds to help Miami extend possessions that often ran deep into the shot clock.

"They were able to control the tempo of the game," coach Gary Williams said. "We were very impatient in the first half. We're good when we go inside-out and we looked for the jump shot first today."

It was one of the few times all year the Terps had virtually no pressure to perform, and they handled the new experience poorly. It wasn't like the 8-0 start, which served as a catalyst for greater expectations, nor the struggles in January and early February when an NCAA tournament berth seemed questionable at best.

The pressure-free days are now over for the Terps, whose season will end after their next loss.