There were times this offseason when Lukas Sotell looked around the gym and lost his bearings.

The junior guard from Stamford, Connecticut, is the only remaining member of Maryland men’s basketball’s exhilarating Sweet 16 run last season. Not even the coaching staff returned.

Looking around the huddle and seeing so many unfamiliar faces in a brand-new practice facility, sometimes he couldn’t grasp that he was the one who was returning.

“At first it was super weird — I felt like I was at another school,” Sotell said. “But the staff treated me like one of their own. ... I love our practices, our skills workouts, our lifting. I feel like I was invited into their home.”

Sotell has benefited from months of immersion into the new identity of Terps basketball. For everyone else who loves this program, it’s probably going to still feel strange for a while longer.

Baltimore was afforded the first glimpse of the new-look Terps on Monday night, and a light crowd in the CFG Bank Arena seats didn’t dim the intensity on the floor. With 15 new players on the roster (none of whom is a Maryland native, for what that’s worth), it would have been helpful for everyone to be wearing their names on the front along with the back.

But soon Maryland’s fans will know this crew. They’ll get to see the high-flying physicality of Pharrel Payne, or the silky shooting of Andre Mills. They’ll get a feel for Diggy Coit’s dimes and Darius Adams’ steals.

But what might take longer will be identifying this team, which rolled out to an 83-61 season-opening victory against an overmatched Coppin State squad, as a distinctly Maryland-flavored team. It is going to feel, at least for a little while, like new coach Buzz Williams packed up College Station and simply unboxed it in College Park.

It’s not so much Terps basketball as Buzz Ball. It’s what you would expect for a newly hired coach who had to start recruiting players as soon as he walked through the door in April. He brought four of his players from Texas A&M, and more he was already recruiting.

If you ask just about anyone on this team why they’re here, the answer is they’re here for Williams. And Williams is here because, well, he’s a rambling man. Given a long enough timeline and a relocation budget, Williams would roam the country coaching every Division I school in five- to six-year increments like a basketball ronin.

It is extremely telling about Williams’ cult of personality that he inspires so much loyalty and love from his staffers and players. Devin Johnson played for Williams as a senior at the University of New Orleans, then followed him on his coaching staff from Marquette to Virginia Tech to A&M and now here.

His allegiance to Williams is absolute. The bond, Johnson said, is like that of a family member.

“It’s something that we haven’t done in a while,” Johnson said of transitioning to a new school. “It’s something easy that we can get adjusted to because of the people we have.”

But in the bigger equation, the University of Maryland is merely the current backdrop to the stage. It is red and gold intellectual property that cuts the revenue share checks.

The shift was always going to feel jarring whether the coach was Williams or someone else from outside of last year’s program, but it’s fair to say last season spoiled fans more than usual.

Not only was the return to the NCAA tournament’s second weekend a benchmark Terps diehards had been waiting years to see met, it had a distinctly local flavor with homegrown players such as Derik Queen, Julian Reese and Rodney Rice as key pieces of the “Crab Five.” It was a fun, charismatic group that left its mark with a buzzer-beating win that will be remembered a long time from now.

But within weeks, coach Kevin Willard made an awkward dismount to head to Villanova, and the entire roster scattered. Just as Terps basketball was fun again, the whole program got leveled.

“It all happened so fast,” Sotell said. “It sucks.”

Because of the whimsical journey of the season directly preceding it, this coming Terps season is going to feel disorienting. Williams won’t even pretend to be anything other than a folksy, Texas-born basketball coach, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing — especially in light of Willard’s sketchy conduct close to the end of his own brief chapter.

On the basketball side, Williams’ devotees preach two things: physicality and communication. While Williams clearly felt some heartburn watching his defense falter in the middle of a game that at times was closer than it needed to be, the Terps turned 20 Coppin State turnovers into 30 points — what is likely the formula for the team to beat opponents much tougher than the Eagles.

The quality of basketball felt like the early season. But the energy rarely dipped.

“I think that’s one of our pillars,” Payne said. “That we’re always willing to fight and compete.”

This transition isn’t just full of new energy for the fans. Williams is getting used to it, too. At the end of his press conference, he offered that he had been to Baltimore just three times in his life: once with the team to the National Aquarium, once with the team to Camden Yards, and on Monday night to play Coppin State.

He talked to the other Maryland Coach Williams — Gary, sporting the Hall of Fame jacket in his courtside seat — about the history of the Terps playing up I-95. He tried to recite some of the previous games in Baltimore he read in the game notes, but didn’t fully trust his memory.

“I’ll do some research and I’ll answer that the next time I see you,” he told a reporter. He gave the sense that it wasn’t just a quip, but a promise.

Growing pains might, at times, be painful. But the coaches and players are committed to winning, which is the most important through line. With change, maybe there is a chance for Maryland to actually grow.

Based on what Sotell has seen, there’s an opportunity for something better to come along.

“It took some time to get used to, obviously, but maybe change is for the best,” he said. “We’ll see.”