The first half, I thought, ended all the drama Wednesday night. WVU, as troubled as it can be on offense and defense, had done well enough on both ends to take a 13-point halftime lead, and WVU, as troubled as it can be on offense and defense, was not going to lose to that TCU team. I was certain of that much after the opening eight minutes.

Yet with the Mountaineers, you have to watch and wonder because they’ve proven no lead is safe either way. How close could TCU get, particularly when the Horned Frogs found themselves down 21 points?

The answer: 11 points. And the Mountaineers handled that with a 10-2 run and then balanced scoring from there to the end to get the 71-50 win — which meant TCU gave up its second-highest point total of the season and finished below its terrible scoring average.

So Bob Huggins, who escaped only the second four-game losing streak of his career, must have been pleased, yes? No, not at all.

“I guess after all these years I learned that you don’t give them back when you win one, but I’m not very happy,” said Huggins, who lost four in a row in the 1984-85 season at Akron, his first as a Division I coach. “I thought we played real hard and I thought defensively we did things we’ve done for a long time in the first half. The second half, we stopped guarding, which has been kind of what we do.”