This one is going to drive Maryland fans crazy the rest of this season. The anticipation for this game was at its usual insane pitch, with students filling up their seats in Comcast early and, according to players, cheering baskets during warmups as eagerly as if they were actually during the game. The signs they were waving showed that they completely ignored Gary Williams' requests earlier in the week that they don't take personal aim; the shots they took at J.J. Redick in his final visit here can't even remotely be mentioned here. All in all, business as usual at that end of the rivalry.

Worse for the Terp supporters, though, is that Duke would have lost yesterday to a sharper, more composed team. D.J. Strawberry and, in relief, Sterling Ledbetter, chased and hounded Redick as much as any defenders have all season; none of his 35 points came easy. The same can't be said for Shelden Williams, though, and that got Gary Williams seething. These players, he said, are on this team and in the ACC for a reason: because they know what it takes to fight teams like Duke and players like Williams and Redick. This group has done it before, he said. They didn't do it well enough yesterday. In an eight-point game, they did enough things poorly and brain-locked just often enough to let this get away.

"They think they're getting up for games,'' Gary Williams said, "but the level you have to get up to when you play a Redick and a Williams, it's really hard to do. You have to do everything right to get ready to play this game. It's going to be a fight for 40 minutes, and you have to want that. We weren't as consistent in that area as I would have liked for the team to be today.''

This wasn't even about playing hard enough. As Nik Caner-Medley said afterward, "We might not have played harder last year; we played smarter and executed better against them, the whole game.'' They beat Duke twice last year. Last month in Durham they pretty much threw the game away with turnovers. Today, they messed up in so many areas (like missing 11 free throws), that fixing up any one of them would have kept the run of wins over Duke - and the aura of having the Blue Devils' number - intact.

Everything seemed muffled and off-kilter. The much-anticipated ceremony of Lefty Driesell taking part in the celebration of Williams breaking his wins record came off as too brief; Williams didn't stick around long after getting the commemorative ball from Driesell, and the Lefthander didn't even speak to the crowd. As for the crowd, once Duke came out of the box strong at the start of both halves, the passion cooled, the throng quieted and the big home-court edge was watered down. Duke is the kind of team that loves silencing hostile crowds. This is the first time in a while that it has done it in this building.

The Terps are running out of chances to turn this around. The troubled senior class, or what's left of it, isn't finishing strong. If this group hadn't already tasted so much success already, as recently as a year ago and dating back to the '04 ACC tournament, this could be written off as an unavoidable speed bump every program hits. But the bump popped up at an unexpected time, and that's making it hard for the faithful to grasp it or explain it.