Forget the woeful non-conference record and the shocking home loss to the CAA’s William and Mary. And don’t worry about the fact that this year’s ACC is a notch below – if not more – the overall talent level of the conference in the last few years.

This Maryland team has a chance to make some noise in March, both in the ACC tournament and beyond.

I’m not ready to book my airfare to Indianapolis or anything crazy like that, but the Terps are 6-2 in conference play and looking more dangerous by the week.  In fact, based on what I’ve seen over the last six weeks, I’d say anything less than a trip to the Sweet Sixteen would be a failure for this year’s Maryland squad.  And they could do a lot more damage than that.

Sunday’s romp over an obviously sub-par University of North Carolina team probably wasn’t worth crying over (Gary), but it surely signaled something once and for all — Maryland will go as far as Greivis Vasquez takes them.

And if Maryland holds on tight, Vasquez might just take them far come tourney time.

Buoyed by strong play under the basket from Jordan Williams, Maryland can finally get some breathing room on the perimeter.  And with teams now forced to give respect to the big man in the paint, the Terps are shooting the ball better than ever.  It’s been a long, long time since the Terps could beat you on outside – mainly because they couldn’t beat you on the inside – and when Vasquez and Eric Hayes are both shooting well, there’s not a better guard-guard combo in the conference.

The experts will tell you that successful NCAA tournament teams need three things: Good guard play, a big man who can contribute at both ends and the #6 and #7 players (off the bench) need to be capable of making a difference.

Maryland has two of the three.  Williams isn’t quite ready to dominate underneath, but he won’t be a liability no matter who he goes up against. The two guards have learned how to play WITH one another instead of AGAINST…and Vasquez is clearly capable of taking over any stretch of the game where his team needs points.  Landon Milbourne has become one of Maryland’s most improved players over the last two seasons.  Once the starters need a breather, that’s maybe where the Terps run into trouble.  Come tournament time, they’ll need 12-15 minutes of quality play from Dino Gregory, Adrian Bowie and Cliff Tucker.  That might be asking too much of those three, but Maryland can’t beat top ranked teams if those three don’t help out.  You can’t win NCAA tournament games without a bench.

Make no mistake about it, the emergence of Jordan Williams has given Maryland new life.  For years, like the Ravens without a wide receiver, the Maryland offense sputtered without a go-to-guy under the boards.  And not much was expected from the freshman duo of Williams and James Padgett, but Williams has turned into a steady force at both ends and gives Gary Williams several options offensively depending on the opposition and their size down low.

More than anything else, Greivis Vasquez has finally come of age.  It took four years, and who-knows-how-many late night talks with Gary, but the senior guard looks more and more willing to do whatever it takes to win rather than trying to be the reason why the team wins.

Gary deserves a lot of the credit for Vasquez’s development, mainly because he stuck with him through thick and thin.  Maligned for years as a “me first” player who was great one night and absent the next, perhaps a senior year devoid of discussion and rumor about going in the NBA draft has freed up Vasquez to focus on what he does best — play basketball.

My guess is that Greivis’ college career will be far more successful than his professional run in the NBA.  He’ll likely earn a lucrative paycheck in Europe somwhere after giving the NBA a go for a year or two.  In the NBA, he’s a man without a position:  Doesn’t handle the ball well enough to play the point and isn’t a good enough shooter to play the 2.  And I don’t think his ego will allow him to be a bench-warmer/check collector in the NBA.  But he’ll make a boatload of money in Spain or Italy or Turkey and isn’t that the goal, after all?

All that said — no matter what happens to Vasquez in the NBA draft this summer, the final six weeks or so of Vasquez’s college career are now in full focus and there’s no longer the annual “should I stay or should I go?” drama that surrounded him in the spring of ’08 and ’09.  This is it.  Go hard.  Or go home.

And because of that, I think Vasquez is poised to go out like a champion.

Say what you will about the first three years of his career at Maryland and the ups and downs he – and the team – experienced, but the kid has a lot of heart.  At times, though Gary would never admit it, he might have been more trouble than he was worth, but not anymore.  He IS the Maryland team now.  As he goes, they go.  If the Terps play Ole Miss or Texas A&M in the first round of the tournament and Vasquez has 9 points and 4 assists, Maryland loses. He’s become their heartbeat.

Perhaps the best description an athlete or a coach can have is being called “a winner”.  That’s a term that fits Gary Williams for sure.  He’s not as polished with the media as he could be and he’s probably not the most well-liked guy within his own athletic department, but the dude can coach basketball.  And when he has the tools in place, he can win.  The fact that his coaching acumen goes underappreciated was on center stage as recently as yesterday after his team punished North Carolina by 21 points.  Gary’s voice broke during his post-game radio address and if tears of joy were ever an indication of an ongoing battle, than Sunday’s episode and the welling up in Williams’ eyes only tell part of his story.  You’d think a man with a national title wouldn’t get choked up just because his team beat a lowly UNC team – after all, Coach K wouldn’t EVER well up over a regular season win over ANYONE at this stage of his career – but that just goes to show you how much work Gary has left to do to cap off his career…in HIS mind.

Gary Williams is a guy with nothing to prove, but for some reason, thankfully, he still coaches like he has plenty left to prove.

And the same goes for Vasquez.  He’s a winner.  For the first few years, the Terps didn’t have much assistance for Vasquez and the team labored through a tough time before bouncing back to win a game in the tournament last spring.  Oddly enough, this time last year, there was talk of Williams being fired — and one of the reasons?  Vasquez wasn’t getting the job done.  Then along came that memorable game against UNC at Comcast Center and a spurt in the ACC tournament and suddenly Williams was back in the big dance.

They’re going back this March, too, barring some crazy collapse in the final half of the ACC regular season schedule.

This time around, though, Vasquez will be fully aware that this chance is his final one — the last opportunity to etch his name next to Juan Dixon and Steve Blake, both of whom are perhaps not his equal in terms of basketball ability. But those two have something Vasquez hasn’t even sniffed in three years at Maryland…a trip to the NCAA’s holy grail, aka, “The Final Four”.  And while it’s unlikely he’ll walk away from Maryland with a title banner blowing in the rafters, he’s done as much if not more than Dixon and Blake in terms of keeping the program afloat and has done so with far less talent around him than those two had in the final two years of their run at College Park.

This Terps team is far from flawless and as they showed last week in Tallahassee, they still have the ability to throw in a clunker on any given night.

For the first time in a while, though, it appears as if they’re gaining steam in February instead of hanging on for dear life.

And that could make for a wild March in College Park.