Never mind the inexplicable and unacceptable snow here today, it’s most certainly March. Yesterday WVU and Louisville played as fun a game as I can remember covering in quite some time. Someone I know who has been attending games at the Coliseum since Bob Huggins was a player put the game in his top five. Top five.

Whatever your ranking, it had all the features of March basketball and neither team could have left the Coliseum without being better off heading into postseason play.

And that’s where we’re headed now. It’s an inescapable reality. Say sports or the Madness are not your thing. It’s still popping up in the Wall Street Journal.

For two weeks in February, The Wall Street Journal followed West Virginia, a team that’s been trying to secure an at-large NCAA invite amid a brutal six-game stretch against five ranked teams to close the regular season. As tough as that sounds, it isn’t even the toughest series of games played by a Big East team this season (St. John’s took on eight straight ranked opponents in January).

The run began on Feb. 14 when the Mountaineers played three consecutive top-20 opponents (at then-No. 17 Syracuse, home against No. 8 Notre Dame and at Pittsburgh). They won the middle game and lost the others by double digits.

The next game, at Rutgers on Sunday, was supposed to be a relative breather, but it wasn’t. West Virginia didn’t pull away until the final two minutes. The Mountaineers then won a pivotal game against No. 16 Connecticut Wednesday, virtually assuring themselves of an NCAA tournament invite.

The extreme degree of difficulty in the Big East first hit West Virginia coach Bob Huggins two years ago as he relaxed on the team bus with a Jimmy Johns sandwich after upsetting Georgetown on the road. “My assistants came over and put, like, 12 tapes on my seat,” he said. “They said, ‘Come on, Huggs, we’ve got Pitt on Sunday.’ That’s just our league. It’s brutal.”

Jimmy Huggs was just warming up his postseason anecdotes. Following the win Saturday, someone asked Huggins what another 20-win season meant next to all the others. He wouldn’t take the bait. Never does.

You know why.

“Everyone wants me to reflect. I’m not very reflective. I’ve told you, when I was a kid growing up and going to play, I got in a guy’s pickup truck. It didn’t have a rear view mirror. I said, ‘Phil, you don’t have a rear view mirror.’ He said, ‘We ain’t going backwards, boys.’ I don’t live my life going backwards.”

I’m delighted to know the name of the man who shaped Huggins’ life … and mine.

More March housekeeping arrived Sunday when  Kevin Jones — he of the first 25/15 in 10 years at WVU and the first game with 11 offensive rebounds since 1953– was named honorable mention all-Big East.

Jones was a preseason first-team pick and said yesterday “it was a bit of a burden living up to those expectations.”

Monday John Flowers should be named the Big East’s defensive player of the year. I might be angry if he’s not. Fortunately for him, the ballots were due Saturday, so perhaps a coach who was on the fence, or wasn’t sold on Flowers, took note of everything he did against Louisville.

A year ago, the ballots were due on Friday, the day before the end of the regular season, and Da’Sean Butler’s performance against Villanova didn’t factor into his player of the year candidacy.

One more note, and it’s just to hammer home how good that win was for WVU and how hard the team played to make up for some deficiencies. The offensive rebounding was critical to cover for more shaky shooting. Casey Mitchell’s shots were equally vital to get out of the late deficit. WVU guarded very well on its end of the floor on a day when it gave away a lot of possessions on the other end.

But Deniz Kilicli, who we can all agree is at the very least a significant part of the plan, played nine minutes and, by my plus/minus calculations, finished with an astonishing minus-18.

It matches the worst +/- of the season by a WVU player. Truck Bryant was -18 at Pitt, but he played 30 minutes abd WVU lost by 13 points. Dalton Pepper was -18 in seven minutes against Marshall, but he was on teh floor the final 3:38 when the Herd blew WVU off the floor and went on n 18-3 run. The Mountaineers lost that one, too, but by just four points.

Kilicli’s game was something else — and not all the errors he was involved with were his fault. The Mountaineers were outscored 24-6 when he played. The Mountaineers won. It’s March.