Hi! Happy March. Today is the first day of the best month of the year. March 1 is always the beginning of the end and the end of the beginning. It gets real now.

And five weeks from today, it’s all over. I know this not because I looked at a calendar. I’ve been around WVU basketball for a long time this season and I’ve seen probably all the players wear a T-shirt — gray or black, short sleeves or no sleeves — with this printed across the chest:

HOUSTON
4-4-2016

That’s the site of the Final Four and the date of the championship game.

TeamRankings.com has cooled slightly on the Mountaineers — favored to win the final two games, but no longer the favorite to win the conference tournament — but gives them decent odds to play on April 4. Only six teams have better odds of winning.

So pardon the Mountaineers, who went 3-4 across seven games before winning back-to-back games last week, for being the oddities that sit in the top 10 in the final week of the regular season and feel better now than they have during all that’s happened before.

“I’m never happy,” WVU coach Bob Huggins said.

Nevertheless, the Mountaineers (22-7, 11-5 Big 12) are in second place in the conference standings and can secure that spot by winning their final two games. They’ve won two in a row after back-to-back losses, and they had their full roster for those victories after having that luxury just once while going 3-4 before that.

WVU is maybe just now where it wants to be.

“It’s good to have everybody back,” Huggins said. “They you can rotate guys in and out better.”

Nathan Adrian has started 10 straight games. Teyvon Myers has started the last four, including two with former starter Daxter Miles back after missing two games. WVU’s bench has been further fortified with another one-time starter, Jon Holton, joining stalwart substitutes Jaysean Paige and Tarik Phillip.

“We went through a tough, rough patch as far as playing people, but it was time for us to find ourselves and for guys who weren’t playing, like Nate and Teyvon, to get some time and get some run and blossom a little more,” forward Devin Williams said.