Every team is different, and this team is four long days away from getting where these other two teams appeared, but it’s nevertheless fun to look.

Bob Huggins made the Final Four as a — ahem — No. 4 seed in 1992. He came off Sweet Sixteen and first-round losses to make the national semifinal in 2010, and doesn’t that sound familiar?

But on Saturday, when his team was retired for the season, Notre Dame coach Mike Brey complimented the men — “old dudes” — West Virginia has this season, and I knew I’d heard that, too, as it related to the 1992 team that was not swayed by the Fab Five and the 2010 team that survived the bare-knuckle Big East and then its tournament.

So shake that up and pour it over ice and imbibe in the present overlapping the past.

The 2010 team was remarkably loose, too. The players produced and shared hilarious skits from their hotel rooms. They turned news conferences into comedy specials and peppered each with jokes, one-liners and giggles. Huggins actually had to answer questions about why the group was so cool. He’d later acknowledge that one of the predominant stories about his team was how much it enjoyed the stage, and he attributed it to “being around my effervescent personality all the time.”

Jokes aside, this team is more serious. A reporter from Canada, not familiar with the reserved Carter and the introspective Macon, the less-is-more approach from Adrian and the manic competitiveness of Phillip, asked Huggins last week why their mood was so somber.

“I was in the locker room with them. They weren’t very somber in there,” Huggins said. “It’s a long year, you know? It’s a long year, and you can’t get too excited about the highs, and you can’t get too down about the lows. I think probably the appropriate thing to do is to keep an even keel.”

Perhaps it’s just an appearance for the outside, but inside, the severity of the occasion is no laughing matter.

“They’re pretty loose,” Martin said. “Sometimes that’s good. Sometimes that’s bad. Our kids, the way they’ve been the whole year, they like one another. They like playing together. They like being in the gym. It’s just that sometimes the focus needs to be a little better at this time of the year.”