SPOKANE, Wash. --
The Maryland women's basketball team has played about 40 good minutes in this NCAA tournament. Unfortunately, it has taken the Terps two games to do it.
A team with this kind of talent can get away with uneven performances in the early stages of the tournament, but by the time you reach the Sweet 16 - which for the Terps begins tonight at 9 - playing half a game is the quickest way back to the airport, back to College Park, back to the dorm room, back to a world in which the Final Four exists only on a television set.
The Terps enter tonight's game against Vanderbilt more aware than ever before how little they can afford to take minutes off. Their coach, Brenda Frese, made that clear in an animated locker-room speech during halftime of their second-round win Tuesday.
Here in Spokane, removed by four days and 2,500 miles, the echoes can still be heard.
"It was like the old Coach B," senior Crystal Langhorne said of Frese's fiery halftime performance, "before she got pregnant."
Maryland players have no illusions about their first two wins of the tournament, both games in which the top-seeded Terps allowed lesser teams to hang around. Against Coppin State and then Nebraska, from half to half, the differences were noticeable at both ends of the court.
In the first half, both opponents outshot the Terps. Nebraska out-rebounded them. Coppin forced nine turnovers in the first 10 minutes. Both foes held their own in the paint.
And in each game, Maryland responded in the second half. They shot better than 50 percent from the field in the second half of both games, quieted Coppin's top scorer and out-rebounded the Cornhuskers 28-13 in the final 20 minutes.
Why any team would reserve that intensity for just a portion of the game is a mystery; why any team might think it can get away with it is foolish. In the round of 16 and beyond, it's a blueprint for failure.
"We were playing kind of tight," is how Langhorne explains it. "I think we were just so focused on wanting to get out of College Park because of what happened last year." (The Terps lost in the second round of the 2007 tournament, a fact they couldn't escape these past few weeks.)
Other players repeated that explanation. The Terps say tonight they will show that they are freed of that burden, relieved of the pesky albatross they have had to feed and drag everywhere these past 12 months.
"I think now we'll be able to play a lot more free, a lot more confident," said Marissa Coleman, the talented junior who scored 15 of her 19 points Tuesday in the second half, "and you'll really be able to see Maryland basketball."
But that's where it gets a little bit tricky. While Frese and her players insist they aren't worried, inconsistent play isn't exactly a trend that just popped up in these past couple of weeks. Very few times this year has Maryland dominated for a full game. That nagging inconsistency played a major factor in each of their three losses.
In the Terps' early exit from the Atlantic Coast Conference tournament, they shot 52 percent from the field in the first half and 33 percent in the second against Duke. In that double-overtime loss to North Carolina, Kristi Toliver had just two points in the first half. She finished with 20 points and 14 assists. (In a win over Duke a week earlier, Toliver also had two in the first half and finished with 21.) And in their only other loss, in December at Rutgers, the Terps shot 62 percent from the field in the first half and just 22 percent in the second.
Frese says we've seen hints of how good this team can be. Just not lately.
"I don't think as a coach or as a team, you ever feel like you've ever played your best game - 40 complete minutes - but I think that's what you strive for day in and day out," Frese said. "You strive for your best practices and your best game, your most complete game. That's always a goal; that's where we continue to set the bar and continue to aim for."
They've reached the point in this tournament at which they can't keep waiting for the perfect game to come together. The stars aren't going to suddenly line up; the players have to do that on their own.
The Terps survived the first two rounds, and their fans can show off some gnawed fingernails for their efforts. Beginning tonight, they're no longer competing against last season's disappointment. They need to start measuring themselves against this season's potential.
Jumping over the modest hurdle they set last March didn't always require 40 minutes of intensity. Finding out how just high they're capable of leaping, though, probably will.
rick.maese@baltsun.com