— It was media day for the Maryland men's basketball team Thursday and Gary Williams arrived at Comcast Center looking like he was just back from two weeks in Barbados.
Tanned and fit and wearing a snazzy gray suit, white shirt and red tie, he mingled easily with the roomful of pale, rumpled reporters before taking the podium.
But as he sat there smiling and making small talk, I jotted this down in my notebook: gaze your last at the relaxed Gary Williams.
Because once tonight's Maryland Madness ends and practice for the new season officially begins Saturday, Williams goes back to being his old self: demanding, tightly wound, a stomach ulcer in the making as he teaches and cajoles and worries about how to turn yet another Terps team into a winner.
"I'll be my usual calm self," he said dryly. "I'm sure when things go wrong in practice, I won't get upset."
Right.
But the truth is, there's plenty for Williams to worry about in this, his 22nd season as Maryland head coach.
The main thing is that he's got to replace the scoring of three seniors from last season's team: Greivis Vasquez, Eric Hayes and Landon Milbourne, who averaged a combined 43.6 points per game.
Sure, Williams has six returning players, including starters Sean Mosley and Jordan Williams. And he's got three seniors in Adrian Bowie, Cliff Tucker and Dino Gregory, ready to assume leadership roles.
But he also has six new players — including highly touted forward Mychal Parker and guards Terrell Stoglin and Pe'Shon Howard — that have to be integrated into the team, hopefully to push the returning players and step into roles of their own.
"We don't have any preconceived ideas about the makeup of our first eight or nine players," Williams said.
The man is a realist, though. Somebody is going to have to put the ball in the basket.
Somebody besides Jordan Williams, the 6-foot-10, 260-pound center who made the Atlantic Coast Conference All-Rookie team and averaged 9.6 points per game. And somebody besides Mosley, who inspired the Terps last season with his hustle and all-around game, but who was a streaky shooter in averaging 10.1 points per game.
"I worry about our offense," Williams said, who worries about everything during basketball season, including whether the sun will come up tomorrow. "But I worry about our defense first. Cause if we play good-enough defense, that'll help us get some easier shots.
"This year we have a chance to be better athletically than we were last year. We can be more of an up-tempo defensive team, press a little more than we did last year."
The college basketball experts will probably place Maryland somewhere in the lower-middle of the ACC in their preseason rankings.
Privately, Williams will grumble about this. He's always had a chip on his shoulder about rankings, always felt the Terps fail to get proper respect year in and year out.
But that's the sort of slight that has always driven Williams, too. And it will again this year, his 33rd as a college coach.
You can see it happening already.
Defending champion Duke, he says, will be ranked No. 1 in the ACC.
"But after that," he says, "I think you can make a case for a lot of teams."
Meaning: Don't count the Terps out just yet.
Meaning: Wait until February before you pass judgment on this team.
The other thing that drives Williams are nights like last March in Spokane, Wash., when Michigan State's Korie Lucious hit that rainbow three-pointer at the buzzer against the Terps in the second round of the NCAA tournament.
The Terps had just staged a furious rally to come back from 16 points down midway through the second half.
During a timeout, Williams recalled Thursday, "I looked each one of the players in the eye. And they thought they were going to win that game."
Uh-uh, didn't happen. Instead, Lucious threw up that prayer from the left side of the arc. It seemed to hang in the air forever. Then it found the net.
Final score: Michigan State 85, Maryland 83. And just like that, the Spartans players were screaming and howling and hugging each other as Maryland's season came to a shocking halt.
Think Gary let that one go during the offseason?
Right.
"I think about it every day," he said Thursday. "Think about what I could have done different."
Now, of course, there's something else for him to think about.
New season, new team. It all begins tonight at Comcast Center. Gaze your last on a relaxed-looking Gary Williams.
The stomach-churning starts tomorrow.
Give that man some Maalox.
(Listen to Kevin Cowherd Tuesdays from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. with Jerry Coleman on Fox 1370 AM Sports.)