That’s how things got started for Deniz Kilicli Saturday when, in one of the cooler senior day moments, his family joined him after traveling from their home in Turkey to see their first WVU game in person.

The ending was not different. Actually, that’s not completely true.

The Mountaineers had lost, again, and done so in a familiar fashion, one that has frustrated Kilicli all season. It was just three days earlier when he’d confessed he couldn’t handle the losing and that he wasn’t “healthy” before he cut short a postgame interview.

So what would happen after a 27-point deficit preceded a nine-point loss to Iowa State? It was the strangest thing, actually. Kilicli, and most of his teammates, were OK with things.

“Everyone knew what to do,” Kilicli said. “I think we did way better on rotations. People helped each other. It was like, bam, bam, bam. Everyone knew what to do at the same moment. Everyone wanted to win. Everyone wanted to do something for all the others. Nobody pouted. Nobody did any of that.”

I’m serious, these guys think they’re *this* close and that they’ll get there in Kansas City. To hear them talk, its a series of simple fixes and they really do think they can do this. Now, that doesn’t mean they will, or that we ought to believe them, but you could expect a lot less from a team with that resume at this point in a lost season.