So I’m supposed to meet the women’s basketball team in Louisville should WVU get through Albany and LSU in Baton Rouge this week. I have no idea whether I’ll have to pack my suitcase one more time or put it on the shelf for the offseason.

The Mountaineers looked every bit a No. 2 seed in the first half against Albany Sunday and then looked like the No. 15 seed in the second half that got way too close for comfort.

WVU won and gets the homestanding Tigers tomorrow, but as our On-site Friend of the Daily Mail reports, the Mountaineers can’t let history repeat itself if they don’t want history to repeat itself. Mike Carey is gunning for his first Sweet Sixteen, but he can’t let his team play like it did in the first round.

Showing mettle worthy of perhaps a higher seeding, the 15th-seeded Great Danes (28-5) pulled to within 56-51 with seven minutes left to play. West Virginia (30-4) responded with a 16-6 run to put the game out of reach at 72-57 with 1:02 left.

The win advances West Virginia into Tuesday night’s second round to face No. 7 LSU, a 98-78 winner over No. 10 Georgia Tech. The win also helped the Mountaineers break the school record for victories, but coach Mike Carey thinks a repeat performance won’t be good enough.

“Nothing against Albany, but if we play like that (again) LSU will beat us,” Carey said. “Its going to have to be a 40-minute game, 40 minutes of concentrating, attacking and playing our defense.”

I had a coach tell me something once that has always made sense ever since. The hardest thing about being a really good team is understanding it doesn’t mean anything. If that’s true, which is to say it takes a team a while to get used to taking every opponent’s best shot, to playing with the pressure of expectations, to living on a level where dips and dives just aren’t acceptable, to knowing a number next to your school’s name is ultimately worthless, then maybe Sunday wasn’t entirely negative.

WVU stormed the barn at the beginning, vacated that high level of play with some spotty, shoddy execution on offense and defense and then got everything right before everything could go wrong.

I know WVU has been good all season and has faced strong challenges and won big games, but it’s all different in the NCAA Tournament. There’s something uniquely empowering and paralyzing about finality. And the Mountaineers were, at the minimum, in trouble in the middle of the second half.

Eyes, minds and hearts must be open when the team watches film and practices today and you get the feeling Mike Carey is going to let the Mountaineers know they are the underdog tomorrow. That No. 2 before the name merely guarantees they wear white and it’s up to possibly rusty WVU to extend its season.

“I mean, I think you all know me, I’m never satisfied. Am I happy with the way we played the second half? Absolutely not, because if we play that way against LSU we’re going to get beat. You know, again, we have not played for two weeks. We got up by 20, 21, 22 points, and it just seems like we got in a little bit of foul trouble, and then I told them after the game, people coming off the bench, you’ve got to come in and give us a spark.

“We can’t come in and lose a lead because we have somebody in foul trouble. That’s something we’ve done a pretty good job of all year. We’ll be fine. I’m not worried about it. Did we play well, no, but Albany probably had a lot to do with that. Do we have to play better against LSU, absolutely.”