SAN FRANCISCO — The greatest Maryland men’s basketball postseason that never was ended in an Xfinity Center loading dock. It was March 12, 2020, and the Terps’ morning practice was over. Their bus to the airport was loaded. Before long, they’d be flying to Indianapolis for the Big Ten Conference tournament. The world had not yet been turned upside down.

“We’re not getting on the bus,” assistant coach Matt Brady remembered someone saying. “We’re going back in the building.”

The Big Ten tournament had been canceled, the team was told. There would be no ride to the airport, no flight to Indianapolis. Coach Mark Turgeon asked his staff and players to go home. No one knew what would come next. The World Health Organization had already declared the novel coronavirus a pandemic. The Big Ten said it would work with medical experts and school leaders to determine its next step. The situation would be monitored.

In College Park, a postseason of glittering possibilities was ending before it could ever begin. Four days earlier, Maryland had been cutting down nets inside Xfinity Center, celebrating a share of the program’s first Big Ten title with nearly 18,000 fans. The Terps had earned the No. 3 seed in the conference tournament. They were on track for a top-four seed in the NCAA tournament. Coaches and players believed a Final Four was within reach.

They never got close. Never even got on that bus in the loading dock.

“It just seemed surreal,” Aaron Wiggins, then a sophomore guard, recalled recently. “It didn’t seem like anything that really made sense. Obviously, it was out of the ordinary, so it was unfamiliar territory for everybody at that time. So I don’t know. Just weird thoughts looking back at it.”

Now, as one great Terps team returns the program to the Sweet 16, where a matchup with top-seeded Florida awaits Thursday night, the last great Terps team is still making peace with the March Madness it never got.

In 2019-20, Maryland finished the regular season 24-7. It had two future NBA draft picks on a homegrown roster lifted by its chemistry and energized by its last postseason exit. It was a season far more sweet than bitter, players and coaches said, because not every March ends with a win and a ring.

And yet … what if?

“We had every piece that we needed to be successful. And we proved that throughout the season,” said Jalen Smith, then a sophomore forward. “I feel as though we were destined to do something great in the tournament.”

“We had so many really good players,” Wiggins said. “So to have that season kind of cut short was really a bummer for us. But I think we would’ve had a deep run and really had a chance at doing something special that year.”

A ‘special’ team

Those were the expectations all along. The year before, the Terps had lost to LSU on a buzzer-beater in the second round of the NCAA tournament. In the offseason, they’d lost star center Bruno Fernando to the draft. Still, Maryland was considered a top-10 team in the 2019-20 preseason polls.

“Obviously, based off what we did the last year, we learned from it,” Smith said.

The Terps started the season 10-0, leaning on their talented backcourt and Smith’s dominance inside. Senior guard Anthony Cowan Jr. had 72 points over three wins in as many days in the Orlando Invitational. Wiggins, a spark plug off the bench, provided one of the season’s most electrifying highlights with a put-back dunk off his own missed 3-pointer in a blowout win over Notre Dame. Smith had double-doubles in six of his first 10 games. Sophomore guard Eric Ayala helped with his outside shooting, while junior guard Darryl Morsell offered dogged defending. Forward Donta Scott was good enough to start as a freshman.

“When we looked around on those practice courts, that Maryland team was really talented,” Brady said. “You never know what’s going to happen during the course of the season. … You’re always worried about just getting better today and worry about tomorrow when it gets here. That group kind of caught fire and just kept playing better and better.”

Maryland finally stumbled in mid-December, losing back-to-back games at Penn State and Seton Hall. A mid-January road trip was troublesome, too, with the Terps no-showing at Iowa before losing on a last-minute 3-pointer to Wisconsin.

But, over the next month, Maryland played like the best team in the Big Ten, if not one of the best teams in the country. The Terps reeled off nine straight victories, including a revenge win over the then-No. 18 Hawkeyes; a road triumph at then-No. 20 Illinois; and an epic, Cowan-fueled comeback against Michigan State, spoiling the Spartans’ “College GameDay” fanfare.

“So many different guys who could kind of create to put the ball in the basket,” Wiggins said. “And then our willingness as a team to just find different ways every single night to help our team be in a position to win.”

“Defensively, we could do a lot of things,” assistant coach Bino Ranson said. “We could switch. We could mix things up. We could go small. We just had a lot of good things going for us.”

Their chemistry was paramount. Every player in the Terps’ rotation had begun his career at Maryland, and Cowan and Morsell had each started over 50 games under Turgeon. Off the court, there was little friction. Smith said the roster “just clicked, and we meshed with each other, and everybody loved each other.” The team, Ranson said, was “all good people.”

“The transfer portal wasn’t quite as prevalent as it is now,” said Greg Manning Jr., who served as the team’s video coordinator before later being promoted to assistant coach under current head coach Kevin Willard. “So I think that kind of made that team special. They all wanted to be there. They all came to Maryland and were in Year 2, 3 or 4 of the program.”

Gorilla, gone

Still, the Terps were far from perfect. The abrupt departure of freshman reserves (and identical twins) Makhi Mitchell and Makhel Mitchell, who entered the transfer portal 12 games into the season, left the Terps vulnerable inside. The winning streak, meanwhile, turned Maryland into a “marked group” in the conference, Brady said.

With five games left in Big Ten play, the Terps had a three-game lead atop the standings. That advantage did not last long. They lost two of their next three road games, falling at then-No. 25 Ohio State and at Rutgers, and were blitzed early in a “College GameDay” home flop against the then-No. 24 Spartans. If not for a miraculous comeback at Minnesota, where the Terps erased a double-digit second-half deficit and pulled ahead on a last-second 3-pointer by Morsell, Maryland would’ve lost all hope for a Big Ten regular-season title.

“There was a lot of good and bad throughout that whole season,” Wiggins said.

The very best came in the Terps’ regular-season finale. Maryland needed to beat then-No. 25 Michigan inside Xfinity Center for a share of the Big Ten title. In an 83-70 win, Cowan had 20 points and eight assists, while Smith had 18 points and 11 rebounds. Ayala and Wiggins combined for 34 points as Maryland moved into a first-place tie with Wisconsin and Michigan State.

Afterward, fans rushed the court in celebration. Nets were cut down. Confetti was everywhere. Turgeon, who’d won just one NCAA tournament game over the previous three seasons, told the crowd: “Anybody see the thousand-pound gorilla that was on my back that left? That’s not here anymore.”

“Championships are a great cure for everything,” Ranson said. “And not too many times do you end your season with a championship, having won your last game, and we did that against Michigan. And we cut the nets down. And not knowing that we were going to have any more games, it actually makes it sweet.”

Said Wiggins: “We kind of earned the right to go out there and play for something bigger than just the regular-season championship for the Big Ten. So [it’s] definitely bitter in that part, but very sweet because we were in front of the fans and we got to send Anthony Cowan … all of our seniors, we got to send them out on that note.”

‘We thought we had a chance’

Next up was postseason play. The Terps, finally, looked like a contender. On analytical website KenPom, they ranked 11th in the nation in adjusted efficiency, far ahead of where Maryland’s Sweet 16 team had finished in 2015-16 (No. 22 overall).

“We figured things out the last couple of games and just got kind of moving and shaking a little bit, and felt like we were going to make a good run in the Big Ten tournament,” Manning said. “And then obviously, in the NCAA tournament, we were looking forward to it. We thought we had a chance to get to the Final Four that year.”

They never got the chance to dance. After the Big Ten tournament was canceled, Manning said, Turgeon told the team to go home for a few days.

“And it ended up being two or three months,” Manning said.

Ranson had hoped the NCAA could find a way to stage its postseason tournaments, but that dream soon faded. As the Terps’ coaching staff caught up on the news, the seriousness of the situation became apparent.

“It’s funny what you think of now, right?” Brady said. “We all thought, ‘Well, this will pass. Everything will be delayed a day or two.’ … Nobody knew at the time it was going to change everyone’s life for more than a year. But we were optimistic we were going to get back on the plane. But, by the next day, the realization, I think, had hit that our season’s over. Everybody’s season’s over. We’re not going to get a chance to play in March Madness.”

“It was heartbreaking,” Ranson said.

Cowan had played his last game. So had Smith, who turned pro in the offseason and became a first-round pick. But perhaps no one was affected more than their head coach.

As the Terps put away Michigan, clinching their first conference title of any kind since 2010, Smith had delighted in seeing Turgeon smile. “He got scrutinized pretty much the whole time I was there,” he explained — and proving “everybody” wrong, Smith said, was “amazing for me.”

“Every coach sometimes has some stumbles, but the greatest misfortune for Coach Turgeon is not being able to play in that tournament during COVID,” Brady said.

Twenty-one months later, Turgeon stepped away just eight games into the 2021-22 season, mutually agreeing to part ways with Maryland after 11 up-and-down years in College Park.

“Mark Turgeon’s an unbelievable coach,” Manning said. “Fans are going to be fans, whoever the head coach is. But he’s one of the best coaches I’ve ever been around. You talk about recruiting, coaching, game planning — he was unbelievable. But yeah, [the 2019-20 tournament] could’ve changed his career. It could’ve changed multiple of our careers in any direction. But, yeah, it was just unfortunate.”

Forever wondering

Nothing in sports lasts forever. Only a handful of holdovers from that 2019-20 team remain in College Park. Brady left Maryland in 2022 and has coached at Oklahoma, Temple, DePaul and now High Point. Ranson took a job at DePaul in 2021, where he served as an assistant for two seasons.

Smith has played for three NBA teams and now averages 8.2 points and 5.6 rebounds per game for the Chicago Bulls. Wiggins, a second-round pick in 2021, is averaging 11.7 points per game for the Western Conference-leading Oklahoma City Thunder. Cowan, Ayala and Morsell have played overseas, while Scott is in the NBA G League. Other players found careers outside of basketball.

Every once in a while, though, they find themselves thrown together in something close to a team reunion. When Smith got married last summer, Wiggins was his best man. Morsell and Serrel Smith, another former teammate, were groomsmen. So was Brenton Petty, a graduate manager on that 2019-20 team. Former Terps coaches and players dotted the wedding’s guest list, back together for one more ring ceremony, appreciating the memories they’d made and making up for the time they might’ve lost.

“It was a special group,” Ranson said. “Special groups win championships, and we captured the Big Ten regular-season title. But we wanted to play for more.”