Thursday night’s buzzer-beating overtime victory over Columbia provided the University of Maine men’s basketball team with a reason to smile at the end of an otherwise punishing non-conference schedule.
Two trips to the West Coast and beyond, several guarantee games against such high-powered programs as defending national champion Virginia, Washington and Connecticut, and nine road contests compared to just four games at the Cross Insurance Center in Bangor left the Black Bears with a 4-10 record — and only three Division I victories.
The dramatic 75-72 win over Columbia, which featured a game-winning 25-foot, 3-pointer by senior forward Andrew Fleming — following 14 consecutive UMaine points by senior guard Sergio El Darwich at the end of regulation and first 4:39 of overtime — ended what had been a particularly dark stretch of the season for second-year head coach Richard Barron and his club.
Beginning with a 77-44 home-court loss to Dartmouth on Dec. 11, the Black Bears lost their final four games of 2019 by an average of 28.5 points — capped off by a 91-51 defeat on Dec. 29 at Hawaii.
“December was a rough month for us,” Barron said. “We really struggled and lost a lot of confidence and kind of lost our identity somewhere in that first week of December. Even going out to Hawaii we really just weren’t quite connected.”
But UMaine was 1-0 to start the new year and a new phase of its schedule, America East play. The Black Bears hosted Stony Brook in their America East opener on Sunday and lost 73-52, but hope to attack conference play with a renewed focus.
“When we got back from Hawaii, we talked a lot about personally how we want to carry ourselves,” Fleming said. “I think for probably all of December we personally just got deflated and weren’t enjoying trying to get better.
“The last couple of days we’ve really been trying to bring all of our energy and have more pride about why we’re playing and just playing for each other and the state and things like that. We want to continue to build on that,” he said Thursday.
The conference schedule figures to represent another significant challenge given the program’s lack of America East success over the years.
UMaine has never won the league championship and has not compiled a winning record in America East play since 2011. The Black Bears’ last victory in the conference tournament came in 2005.
But this is a markedly different team from the 2018-2019 edition that finished 3-13 in America East regular-season play before falling to top-ranked Vermont in the conference quarterfinals. There are just four team members back from last winter’s active roster.
Vermont, the defending league champion, was the unanimous pick atop this year’s America East preseason coaches’ poll and enters conference play with a 10-5 record.
The Catamounts were followed in the preseason poll by University of Maryland at Baltimore County, Stony Brook and Albany. UMaine was ranked eighth, just ahead of New Hampshire in the nine-school league.
“Vermont’s still the team to beat,” Barron said. “They have a lot of weapons, a lot of depth and great team culture and chemistry … They played a really tough non-conference schedule and performed well.”
Stony Brook, UMaine’s first conference foe, went 24-9 last winter and had the league’s second-best, pre-conference record this season (9-6).
“I don’t think there’s any game that’s going to be easy in the conference,” Barron said. “I certainly hope no one looks at Maine as an easy game. I think everyone’s going to be competitive and fired up. If I were on any team I’d say, ‘Hey, we’ve got a shot.’”
The Black Bears hope to draw inspiration from their late-game heroics against Columbia when they rallied from a 13-point, second-half deficit.
But the understanding is clear: One win doesn’t make for an immediate surge to the top of the standings.
“This is a long process,” Barron said. “I wish there was a get-rich scheme that we could employ here and all of a sudden find the magic formula, but it’s not that easy. It takes time, it takes experience and our guys maybe now are just coming to grips with that, and hopefully, we’ll see improved play as we go through the conference.”
