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The shots kept falling. The lead kept building. The sellout crowd at Xfinity Center kept roaring.

Neither the players on the No. 3 Maryland men’s basketball team nor coach Mark Turgeon had any way of knowing that the Terps had not reached 100 points in three seasons.

When it happened, on a pair of free throws by reserve guard Jaylen Brantley with 37 seconds left in Saturday’s game against Ohio State, there was one more loud ovation to what became the exclamation points to an impressive 100-65 victory.

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While it was going on, Turgeon thought his team not only excelled but also exhaled.

Asked if the dominant victory made a statement, Turgeon said, “I don’t care what it makes. What I talked about before the game, I told the guys I felt like we were kind of holding on against Michigan and Wisconsin, and I said, ‘Guys, we’re going to compete, we’re going to play together and we’re going to have fun.’

“I don’t think we were doing that. I think we were trying to protect a ranking or protect a winning streak or the best start in school [history], whatever. … Hopefully we can sustain that. We’re not going to do that every night, but hopefully we can sustain it and just play basketball.”

On a day when two players shared the spotlight — junior forward Robert Carter Jr. scored a career-high 25 points on 10-for-13 shooting and senior guard Rasheed Sulaimon missed just one of 10 shots in scoring a season-high 22 points — all of Turgeon’s players shared the ball, finishing with a season-high 23 assists, including nine by sophomore point guard Melo Trimble.

“Today for the first time in the league, we really shared the ball at a high level,” Turgeon said. “We looked like a team again offensively. I think we shot 62 percent. Of course, we made shots, a lot of shots, and that makes it look good. … I thought we guarded them well, protected the rim better and we rebounded better. Just a great day for us.”

It was hard to tell what Maryland (16-2, 5-1 Big Ten) did best in its beatdown of the Buckeyes, which was payback for the two one-sided defeats the Terps endured in Columbus over the past two years as well as a message to Top 25 voters who might have doubted Turgeon’s team after its loss at Michigan on Tuesday.

Unlike the recent road games to which Turgeon was referring — one that was lost when Sulaimon’s 3-pointer in the final seconds missed against the Wolverines, the other that ended when Trimble buried a long 3-pointer to beat Wisconsin three days before — Saturday’s game was over quickly.

The Terps pulled away midway through the first half to lead by 18 points at halftime, watched their lead mushroom to as many as 44 points, 91-47, with a little over seven minutes left and then, unknowingly, challenged the school record of a 40-point win in conference play until Turgeon cleared his bench.

Ohio State coach Thad Matta, whose Buckeyes have had more than a few one-sided wins in his 12 years, was left admiring the Terps in his team’s worst defeat in his time at the school.

“I’ve been doing this for a while and that was one of the best performances I’ve ever seen just in terms of them making shots and them having their way with us,” Matta said. “What they did [today] was incredible.”

It was also the largest margin of victory in a conference game in Turgeon’s five years and helped remove the bad taste that had lingered since the Buckeyes had won by 24 points last season, the worst loss for Maryland during a turnaround year and the second-worst for the Terps under Turgeon.

The Terps showed little hangover from their first Big Ten loss in Ann Arbor, Mich., on Tuesday, though Sulaimon conceded that he thought about his potential overtime-forcing 3-pointer after he left the Crisler Center early Wednesday morning.

“It was a tough one on Tuesday. I thought I should have made the shot, but I missed,” he said. “That stuck in my mind. If I’m ever in that position again, I want to come through for my team. That’s kind of what motivated me. Today, I was fortunate that the shots I put up, I only missed one.”

Carter knew that even though the Terps were one of five teams ranked in the top 10 to lose this week — along with No. 4 Michigan State getting trounced at home by No. 16 Iowa on Thursday — many put more stock in Maryland’s loss to the Wolverines than the defeats of the other highly ranked teams.

“I think there will always be questions,” Carter said. “All we can do is play the best we can play and dominate like we did tonight and let that speak for itself. We don’t need to come out and tell everyone how good [Maryland] is because actions speak louder than words.”

Sulaimon said it was more important for what Turgeon’s team took out of the game than what it showed to the rest of the country.

“More importantly to us, we were trying to prove something to ourselves — that we can be the type of team that showed up today each and every day,” Sulaimon said. “We’re focused on us and we’re trying to get better each and every day.”

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