Just one year ago, it was so different for Sammy Mejia.
“I didn’t know what to expect. It was a cloud of unsureness,” the DePaul guard remembered.
His mind was a muddle as he awaited his first game under new coach Jerry Wainwright.
He had no history to draw on or a past-performance chart to study, so he was left to do nothing but wonder.
He wondered if he would produce. He wondered if things would go well. He wondered about such basics as his team’s substitution pattern.
“It was just a . . . I don’t want to say a question mark,” he said. “It was just a bunch of thoughts gathered around, trying to figure out what was going to happen.
“But this year, we know what to expect. We’re excited. We’re really excited about this year.”
He was speaking late last week, just days before the Blue Demons opened their second season under Wainwright, and his excitement was palpable. His tone was joyous, his manner buoyant, his eagerness evident. Together they testified to his anticipation of the trip ahead.
His team’s familiarity with Wainwright and its late performances last season ( winning three of its final five) were the reasons for that.
Then, when DePaul opened its season Saturday night, his mood was altered and his buoyancy was burst at Carver Arena where Bradley inaugurated its own new season with a 78-58 thrashing of the Blue Demons.
DePaul has four starters back to just two for the Braves. It is younger than the Braves, whose opening lineup included three seniors and two juniors, and it was bumping up against the Braves’ 17-game non-conference home winning streak
The Blue Demons also found themselves window dressing at the pregame ceremonies that celebrated the Braves’ trip to the Round of 16 in last spring’s NCAA tournament.
Still, DePaul should have been familiar with inhospitable sites after trips to Pittsburgh and Louisville last season.
“The key thing, what we’ll be judged upon this year, is carryover,” Wainwright said before this game, thinking of those late performances that included a 39-point pasting of Syracuse.
But despite Mejia’s mien and optimism, there was more regression Saturday night than progression, more reversion to bad habits than assertion of a new-found identity.
The Blue Demons, always a step slow on defense, were drilled by the Braves, who buried eight three-pointers in the first half and 13 for the game, who hit 53.3 percent of their threes in the first half and 52 percent in the game.
The Blue Demons were done in by their own mistakes, which included nine first-half turnovers and 18 in the game, 30.4 percent shooting from beyond the arc and just 53.8 percent from the line.
They got limited use from Wilson Chandler, the player Wainwright has anointed his team’s go-to man. He sat most of the first half in foul trouble and ended with 12 points in just 24 minutes.
They got even less in terms of consistency, which Wainwright said his team must show if it wishes to progress. They floundered most notably at the start of the second half as Bradley scored on nine of its first 10 possessions and opened a 19-point lead.
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This was a deja vu performance for the Blue Demons, who were now so far down they couldn’t respond even after Bradley stars Jeremy Crouch (22 points) and Daniel Ruffin (12) were forced to sit with foul trouble with more than 12 minutes remaining.
There was no response left in them and in the end, there was Mejia exiting with a blank look on a face that once had radiated such eagerness.
“It was a good experience,” Wainwright said after the loss. “I don’t know if we’ll see anybody in our conference quite like Bradley. They really have some speed and they’re a little more organized now than we are. Their carryover from last year was greater than ours.
“When things get tough for us, we still press a little bit.”
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