Two teams played really hard for 45 minutes, and the fatigue, both mental and physical showed on both sides. In the end, the very mature hosts managed and submitted just a few less mistakes and the ranked visitor was made to rue foul shooting and leaving a left-handed shooter open on the left side for a 3 with a two-point deficit.

Those are the breaks in a long season, and Bob Huggins was, as you might imagine, unhappy afterward.

After the game, West Virginia coach Bob Huggins was nearly inaudible — even as he slighted the Big 12 schedule, the timing of the game and his team’s effort.

“We haven’t shot well at free-throw line all year,” Huggins said. “When you miss free throw after free throw you would think it would bother you enough to go work your tail off to try to fix it and instead be the last one in damn every day.

“My fault for playing them.”

When asked about what he planned to say to his team tomorrow, he said he didn’t know — they’d probably be still sleeping.

“We get home at 6 a.m. in the morning, what the hell do you think we are going to do?” Huggins said. “We are going to try to sleep. The league has been great, but this is not. For us to play a 9 p.m. game on Eastern Time and get home at six in the morning is hard.

“When I watch film I have to listen to broadcasters talk about the hard trip they have to take to Morgantown, but they do it one time. We do nine. What do you want me to do with them? We are going to sleep.”

Texas Tech, we knew, was going to be a tough opponent, and it proved worthy. The Mountaineers are still good, and though they met a team that matches up favorably, they also can reasonably understand how that ended the way it ended. The free throws are the main culprit, but the defense wasn’t as fierce or as effective and WVU wasn’t careful enough with the ball. But all the other edges were there.

The Mountaineers are still a little undercooked, I think, and can lose games when they are the better rebounders and have the advantages in areas like bench points and second-chance points because they can’t yet shore up everything at once. That’s not a slight against them. Elite teams do that and elite teams struggle with that. Were we under the impression WVU was elite?