COLLEGE PARK - While living the blur that was the busiest summer of his professional life, while making endless speeches and accepting countless awards and fulfilling the list of obligations that mark a champion, University of Maryland men's basketball coach Gary Williams never stopped thinking about this day.
After working through a long preseason and learning to perform with a host of new players, senior point guard Steve Blake said he is hungrier than ever to start over.
Senior forward Tahj Holden is eager to prove that these Terps, having lost so much, still have so much to offer.
Nearly eight months after doing what no University of Maryland men's basketball team had ever done, nearly eight months after sending a school and so many fans into a state of euphoria, it's finally time for the Terrapins to begin to prove their mettle once again.
"It does feel different after you win a national championship," Williams said. "Even if you've had a good team, you've always lost that last game before, and you wanted to get back quickly. I was concerned that, after winning that last game, I wouldn't feel the same way. Once we started practicing, it felt the same way."
And what a setting in which to launch the mission of defending the first national title in school history. Today, against visiting Miami (Ohio), Maryland will unveil its new face in a new place, where it will give one final nod to recent glory before getting on with the future.
The 13th-ranked Terps, who officially will christen Comcast Center by unveiling the NCAA championship banner in a pre-game ceremony - forever honoring its 64-52 victory over Indiana in the NCAA tournament final last April 1 - now feature five new players, four freshmen and four first-time starters.
Juan Dixon and Lonny Baxter don't live here anymore. The program is now in the hands of Blake, the four-year starter, and former backups like Holden, senior shooting guard Drew Nicholas and senior center Ryan Randle, each of whom helped take the Terps to the top.
It now belongs to precocious talents like Nik Caner-Medley and fellow freshmen like point guard John Gilchrist, power forward Travis Garrison and shooting guard Chris McCray.
Starting today, under the glare of real competition and the weight of a bull's-eye that a defending champion must carry, Williams will begin to craft the makings of a rotation that could go nine or 10 players deep. Imagine the electricity that will circulate through the new digs as the Terps take their first step.
"I'm looking forward to seeing how it's going to feel. We'll get to see the building as it should be. The real, season ticket-holding crowd will be here," Williams said. "I want the players to enjoy the opening ceremony. But at the same time, you have to turn that off and put all of that emotion back into the game. We have to be a mature team."
"After that banner comes down, we've got a game to play. It's a whole new set of players, a new team," Holden said. "We're talented, and our young guys don't have time to sit back and enjoy their freshman years. I think we're going to be a real exciting team to watch and a fun team to watch and, hopefully, a difficult team to play against."
The first several weeks of the season will be revealing. Maryland will play seven games in the next three weeks, including a visit to Indiana on Dec. 3 and a visit by Florida on Dec. 14.
With Blake running the offense and looking to score significantly more that his 7.3-point career scoring average suggests he will, it will be interesting to see how smoothly Nicholas inherits Dixon's role as a go-to scorer, or how well Randle can anchor the low post after playing so well off the bench a year ago, or how well Holden handles full-time duty now that the soft-shooting, 6-foot-10, 270-pound senior is healthy again after battling foot injuries the previous two years.
It will be interesting to see how much Williams works Gilchrist into a three-guard alignment that allows Blake and Nicholas to operate as scoring threats more freely.
Or how effectively Garrison and 6-9 forward Jamar Smith, the junior transfer from Allegany College, can cement a four-man rotation up front that was the foundation of Maryland's success during its back-to-back Final Four runs.
Williams also appears set to start 6-3 senior guard Calvin McCall at the small forward spot, at least temporarily. McCall, the former quarterback who walked on two years ago and earned a scholarship after Maryland's first Final Four appearance, started both preseason exhibition games with the other four seniors. He appeared in 19 games last year, averaging 1.4 points.
The position likely will be Caner-Medley's in the near future. The 6-8 product of Deering High School in Maine averaged 17 minutes in the exhibition contests, and showed the kind of leaping and rebounding ability that landed him in College Park.
Even though he produced more than McCall during the preseason, Caner-Medley is still getting comfortable in Williams' flex offense.
"It doesn't really matter to me if I start or come off the bench. I just hope I'll be able to contribute," Caner-Medley said. "I'm just trying to be solid, do the little things, make the hard cuts, pass the ball when people double-team me. I know I'm not the go-to guy."
Blake, making his 106th career start today, is unquestionably one of those guys. Already the school's career assist leader, he has added 10 pounds of muscle and a desire to put the ball in the basket more often. He will get his wish, and he is ready to drive the Terps one more time.
"I've enjoyed the [six-week] long preseason. It was necessary because we have so much to learn as a team," Blake said.
"But it will be good to get better as a team in the rhythm of the regular season, with game after game. I'm ready finally for a real game against a real college team."