March Madness needs no publicity. The annual chaos of the NCAA tournament speaks for itself.

All the college basketball leading up to it, on the other hand, is in a rut. So much of the conversation around the game is about the perceived negatives: hard-to-track transfers, cynicism over the name, image and likeness system, programs that can’t carry momentum from year to year. These image problems have drained some of the traditional buzz from the sport.

What if I told you there is a program that is having one of its best seasons ever? That has lost in the conference semifinals for three straight years — but has responded by bringing back its top seven scorers from last season and rattling off 12 straight conference wins? That is filling up its home arena and gratifying the vision of its longtime coach?

You don’t have to look far for a great college hoops story. Towson men’s basketball is right in Baltimore’s backyard.

As the No. 1 seed in this weekend’s Coastal Athletic Association tournament, the Tigers are trying to break the mother lode of all the program’s bad streaks — a 34-year drought since their last NCAA tournament appearance.

The last time the Tigers made it, they were known as Towson State. No players on the roster were born, and Skerry, who has coached at the program for 14 seasons, was a college point guard at Tufts University.

“I want this to happen for our great university,” Skerry said at a practice this week, “because I know they’re salivating for it.”

No one is salivating more for a breakthrough than the Tigers players, who have won at least 20 games for the fourth straight season. They’ve run up against the CAA semifinal wall for three straight years, the last two against the College of Charleston. A modern-day response to that kind of rut might be for the most talented players to transfer to greener pastures — not at Towson, where the Tigers are determined to crack the bracket on their own terms.

Sophomore Tyler Tejada thought a lot in the offseason about the sobering 61-56 finish to last year’s 20-win campaign as he hoisted shots to make 500 to 600 every day. Junior Dylan Williamson, another returning double-digit scorer, joined him in the gym.

“We want it so bad,” Williamson said. “Losing in that same game the past two years just makes me so hungry.”

Skerry has been particularly impressed by this group, saying he’s never had a team that works as much outside of practice as this one. But that effort didn’t show in the early results. A tough nonconference schedule, combined with injuries, led to skids, at one point reaching six losses in a row.

But, after turning into conference play, Towson turned it around quickly. The Tigers win with ball control, boasting both the lowest turnover percentage in the CAA and the highest steal percentage.

By combining that with timely shooting in close games — seven of the 12 consecutive wins were by single digits — Towson has manufactured victories. Even how it wins tends to raise Skerry’s blood pressure.

In its closest victory of the season, 55-54 over Drexel at home, neither team scored in the last three minutes of regulation. Williamson in particular has a knack for the late shots, like draining a 3-pointer with 12 seconds left over the weekend against Hampton. With a handful of exceptions, very few margins have been comfortable, but somehow it works for the Tigers.

“For me, I never look at it as pressure,” Tejada said. “You live to be in close games in tight moments like that.”

During the streak, Skerry was surprised to find out how many people around him were superstitious. A former assistant stopped messaging him. Program donors were reluctant to reach out. As the Tigers got out to their best-ever conference record, even loyalists didn’t want to mess with the team’s mojo.

Skerry and his players didn’t buy into it, though. They believe they create their own fortune.

“You know what’s bad for our superstition? If our transition defense is bad,” Skerry said ahead of a team practice this week. “There is pressure. But the pressure is to execute. … We do that, we tend to find our way.”

The team isn’t alone in enjoying the spoils of success. Towson’s final home game of the season against Hampton reported 4,705 in attendance, the second-highest figure in school history.

Towson’s rise runs counter to the trends in the NCAA landscape, now rife with annual transfers and constant roster rebuilding. Even though Williamson and Tejada chose to come back this season, Skerry knows that’s no guarantee that he’ll have all his vets back next year — putting pressure on the Tigers to capitalize now.

“We’re enjoying what we just accomplished and excited for what’s ahead,” Skerry said. “But we’re also aware that who knows [what next season brings]. I just feel like what you sign up for in the job has changed in that regard.”

That urgency has only made the Tigers more attuned to the present. At a practice this week, Skerry stopped play, shouting: “You can’t run it back. Every possession matters!”

That axiom will apply Sunday, when the Tigers play either Elon, the team that broke their 12-game winning streak, or Drexel, against which they eked out two close wins in the regular season.

The winning streak ending Feb. 20 was its own kind of lesson, even though Skerry’s philosophy is there’s no such thing as a good loss. For the players, it was a reminder of what’s at stake. With their next loss, their season could end. They’ve already won 12 straight this year — winning three more in a row ensures an NCAA tournament berth.

How hard could it be?

“It was just like, ‘OK, I see we can be beat. Let me watch film and see what we need to do so it don’t happen again,’” Williamson said. “I don’t see it happening again soon.”