Well, about 35 minutes until the Terrapin men’s basketball team is schedule to tip off against North Carolina here at Comcast Center, the students are here and some of the paying customers as well.

As per an ACC rule stating that if the visitors and at least two officials make it to the site, today’s show had to go on. It hasn’t really been an easy last few days for either team. With the mega snow dump on the College Park area in recent days, Terp coach Gary Williams has been sleeping at the arena. The defending national champions caught a Friday flight to the area, just hours after returning home from a Thursday night loss at Virginia.

“We’re both dealing with it, so there’s no disadvantage or advantage here,” Williams said. “It’s not a normal routine, but it’s not normal for either team. You have to deal with it.”

If the weather hadn’t thrown the team’s schedules into disalignment and threatened this game happening on this day, the major story line would’ve been the decline of the Tar Heels.

They come into this game at 13-9 with a 2-5 record in ACC play. They’ve lost six of their last eight games and don’t much resemble the Tyler Hansbrough-led team that rolled through last season’s ACC slate.

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TALLAHASSEE, Fla.— Coming off a 26-turnover effort that resulted in a 62-53 loss at Clemson on Sunday, you probably came into last night’s game against Florida State looking for some signs of life from the Terrapin men’s basketball team’s offense.

And early on, you probably didn’t find any.

The Terps missed their first five shots and never really turned it around in the first 20 minutes. The shot a respectable 39 percent, but they got to the foul line just twice and turned the ball over seven times. Most notably, the flex offense wasn’t producing the open looks and easy baskets that were a staple of some of the Terps’ dominating ACC performances last month.

Just 10 seconds into the second half, Jordan Williams threw down a dunk. Landon Milbourne followed that by swishing a midrange jumper. And then Eric Hayes buried the Terps’ first three-pointer of the game.

The Terps kept that going, hitting 11 of their first 20 shots to build their lead to as much as nine in the second half.

“We just picked up our intensity as far as running our plays,” Milbourne said. “We trusted in our plays a lot more. The first half we didn’t really run everything through. We got kinda flustered and started going on our own.”

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TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – If you read my gamer in today’s paper, you know the emphasis that I clearly placed on the charge that Dino Gregory took on Michael Snaer with 14 seconds left in last night’s 71-67 win at Florida State.

Greivis Vasquez said it was ”the reason we won the game.”

An improved second half offense and senior leadership also contributed, but a hostile (read: mostly vulgar) crowd really seemed to believe the Seminoles were going to squeeze out a win until that play.

Especially on a day when four starters combined to score literally 94 percent of the team’s points and all of its field goals, Gregory’s play, coupled with a pair of key free throws he hit with 2:21 remaining in a then-tie game, served as the needed bench boost.

“Dino Gregory, who hasn’t been doing a lot of things for us, was big,” coach Gary Williams said as part of his opening statement. “He took the charge, plus he made a couple of really good defensive plays down there and made two big free throws himself, so it was a team effort.”

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