So you’re the University of Maryland, and you’ve just been burned by Kevin Willard.

The guy you thought might stick around for a career turned tail after just three seasons, making a racket on the way out loud enough for all the neighbors to notice. You’re hurt, you’re the subject of all kinds of gossip, and the roster that helped propel you to one of the best seasons in years is quickly clearing out.

With this level of desperation, Buzz Williams stepping into the frame must feel like a godsend for an embattled athletic department. It took just days for the Terps to come running into his arms.

The 52-year-old, who the Terps hired Tuesday to lead the men’s basketball team, has a consistent winning track record, and his energy will carry from what’s sure to be a guffawing, good-natured press conference onto the recruiting trail where he has historically done well, too.

So why does this hire feel less like an inspiration and more like a rebound? Why does it feel like Maryland is trading one flighty middle-aged coach with out-of-state ties for another?

Hiring Williams might be the best-case scenario for an athletic department that has an interim AD, just took a pummeling from its own coach and whose donor and fan base feel jaded and cynical from the drama of Willard’s exit. It’s safe to assume Williams will set a high floor for the program: He’s had 11 NCAA Tournament appearances in 18 seasons, and just three years with a losing record across stints at New Orleans, Marquette, Virginia Tech and Texas A&M.

In other words, he’s the perfect coach to get the Terps to tread water for the foreseeable future. But the ceiling-raiser that fans have craved to get back to the Gary Williams glory days? There’s no evidence that Buzz Williams can do that.

Williams’ track record is more suggestive of mere stability. He’s a guy who makes the program respectable, but not a real contender, until he decides to leave after five or six seasons, at which point Maryland will be in this exact position again.

Consider the context. Williams has never stayed in one place for more than six seasons.

Not Marquette, where he made three straight Sweet 16s and had godlike authority in the athletic department. Not Virginia Tech, where he made a historically mediocre program good, only to leave and have it descend. Not at Texas A&M, which is roughly 230 miles from the town where he grew up.

Williams is a searcher, a rover. Once he builds and hits the ceiling — never breaking through — he moves on.

His track record doesn’t really match what Maryland might be looking for in the wake of coaching heartbreak, if they’re really set on having someone stay to direct things long-term the way that, say, women’s basketball coach Brenda Frese has. Williams feels like the date you bring to the next big social function after your breakup to show your friends you’re already over your ex.

I’ll admit I have some conflicting impulses here, because the nonstop freight train of college basketball recruiting demands that someone take the reins of the program to recoup what Maryland is already losing. Rodney Rice, Ja’Kobi Gillespie and Deshawn Harris-Smith are already reportedly in the transfer portal — perhaps being drawn by Willard to start his new fiefdom at Villanova. Williams also has experience recruiting the fertile DMV grounds that the Terps so desperately want to keep tapping.

Maryland is also, frankly, a department in disarray. Colleen Sorem and Brian Ullmann reportedly worked with President Darryll Pines to knock out the hire, but it’s not yet clear who will be the school’s next permanent athletic director. Not every coach wants to come in without knowing his or her boss — as Willard bluntly told the world in his final Terps press conference.

But if it feels a little too good to be true, it just might be. The school is touting that Williams could become just the third head coach to win 100 games at four different schools (a list that includes the great Lefty Driesell) but that should give every fan with heartache over Willlard’s short tenure at least a little pause. He also has won just four NCAA Tournament games in the past decade, with his one Sweet 16 breakthrough in that span in 2019 against a 13 seed and a 12 seed.

I’d wager that many Terp fans would love to replicate the run they just had to the NCAA’s second weekend, but it’s clear that they want to do it more than once a decade, too.

Just two weeks ago, the school was willing to reportedly dish out a Top-10 salary to keep Willard at Maryland. They have a new $52 million practice facility opening this year, and they may commit more revenue share to men’s basketball than their Big Ten counterparts. So is hiring a Top-40ish coach (with a 56-44 conference record with the Aggies) really the right move for them?

What makes it even stranger is that Maryland literally did this already when it hired Mark Turgeon in 2011. The program took a coach from Texas A&M and largely stayed in a competitive stasis for a decade before Turgeon quit midseason. It wasn’t a “lost” era by any means — there were certainly exciting players and moments — but it left fans feeling like something more was always left on the table.

While I respect the call by Terps legend Len Elmore to write “University of Maryland people must lead the University of Maryland athletics program and lead our basketball program,” I’m not sure that there is a real individual who meets that criteria who would be a slam dunk. Duane Simpkins from American, who played for Gary Williams, is intriguing, and George Mason’s Tony Skinn has appeal from his previous stint at UMD. It’s hard to stump for either as the surefire long-term answer that feels, honestly, more a mythical idea than a real person.

But Elmore also wrote something arresting: “No more room for mercenary coaches to play us like fiddles.” Maryland has sought to be top dog again for almost two decades, but with Willard, it was made to feel like a stepping stone. Bringing in Williams smacks of a hire that won’t change perception or results for the Terps, but merely keep things on an even keel.

“Mercenary” might be too strong a word for this scenario, but it’s hard to believe Williams will be setting up for a decade-plus run in College Park. He’s left good jobs before.

In that sense, maybe he and Maryland really are perfect for one another — drawn together not by a desire to win another national championship, but to reach an acceptable baseline of annual NCAA cameos. Rather than take a risk on smaller school coaches, the Terps know exactly what they’re getting in Williams.

They know what they’re not getting, too.