Our goals are the same. Nothing has changed at all. There's no panic here, no sense of any of that stuff. We're close, so doggone close you can still feel it. We've been a one-play-here, one-play-there kind of team so far. That's why we don't sleep a lot at night.

As good as (Jordan) was, our team was fortunate to pull it together and be better than Marist. It's not a game for individuals. It's a game for teams, and our team, today, was better than them.

It's caused them to focus more in a lot of ways.

I don't know if we're consciously trying to do that but we talk about valuing the basketball and the possessions are longer. We've made the possessions longer defensively, playing some zones, and offensively our possessions are longer, too. In years past we just let Alvin Cruz push it up there and try to find somebody quick.

This is one you're just going to second-guess forever and ever and ever. It's hard to look at the positives but that's our job to do. We played the best team in the league . . . and we had them beat, played our hearts and guts out and just couldn't finish the job.

It's our ball and anything but that. It was a combination of execution. One guy not coming hard enough to the ball and another guy not putting enough zip on the pass or reading that he wasn't open.