It only took one acrobatic follow shot the other night at Xfinity Center to change the conversation surrounding Mark Turgeon's surprising — and very exciting — Maryland men's basketball team.
If the Terps had lost at home to a pesky Northwestern team that had won only one Big Ten game this year, they would have suffered back-to-back deflating conference losses and it would have been fair to ask if they were really as good as advertised.
Instead, Dez Wells came flying out of nowhere to complete an unbelievable comeback and the only thing anybody wants to think about now is how much better they can get.
The next big test comes Thursday night at Ohio State. The Terps have already figured out that nothing comes easy on the road in the Big Ten, but when a freshman-heavy group like this wins in spite of itself — like Maryland did on Sunday — it's a pretty good indication that there is still a lot of unrealized potential running around in all those fancy high tops.
Turgeon obviously knows that and doesn't deny it, but he's still trying to fit all the pieces together and he's refreshingly honest about the highs and lows that come with a young team in constant development.
"I know they're really proud of themselves, the way they came back," Turgeon said after Sunday's dramatic finish, "but they also are smart enough and mature enough to know that we've got to be a lot better for us to continue to win and play at a high level."
That might be easy to overlook right now. The Terps are 18-3 and 6-2 in their first season in the Big Ten, a performance Turgeon willingly concedes has been well beyond anyone's preseason expectations. They slipped a few spots in this week's Associated Press Top 25 — to No. 16 — because of their lopsided loss at Indiana, but still are showing up in mock March Madness brackets as a No. 3 seed.
No wonder Maryland athletic director Kevin Anderson looks a little like the cat who ate the canary when he turns up at Xfinity Center these days. The football team delivered a solid debut season in the Big Ten and Brenda Frese's perennially-elite women's basketball team is ranked fifth in the nation with an 8-0 conference record heading into Thursday's game at Michigan.
Turgeon's program turned a big corner at just the right time and the future seems to get brighter by the day. The Terps, already buoyed by the terrific all-around performance of freshman point guard Melo Trimble, just got an oral commitment from four-star recruit Anthony Cowan Jr., a junior guard at St. John's College High School in Washington, D.C.
The biggest challenge facing this year's team is simply maintaining focus and continuing to play the smart, unselfish basketball that carried the Terps to tough nonconference victories over Iowa State and Oklahoma State and led them through a very successful first half of the Big Ten schedule.
If they do that, the competitive evolution of the team should take care of itself. Trimble already is one of the top freshmen in the country and has looked so good that Maryland fans are starting to fret about how long he'll stay in school. Several other talented underclassmen are learning on the job and Wells — the unquestioned senior leader — has yet to play his best basketball.
Wells certainly showed up at a pivotal moment on Sunday night, completing an electric comeback that helped obscure a two-game funk during which Turgeon felt the team regressed. He all but apologized for the win, but allowed that it was the kind of scrappy performance that builds both confidence and team chemistry.
"Hopefully, we'll learn why we got behind,'' Turgeon said after the game. "You've got to give Northwestern credit, but we were out of it defensively and rushing a little bit on offense. So, hopefully, we'll learn from that and pay a little bit more attention to what we're doing. It shows that this group, they're winners. We've got a lot of basketball ahead of us and all that, but they figure out ways to win."
Read more from columnist Peter Schmuck on his blog, "The Schmuck Stops Here," at baltimoresun.com/schmuckblog.