ORONO – As you may have heard, the University of Maine men’s basketball team – you know, the squad ranked No. 268 of 324 Division I teams according to CollegeRPI.com – won two conference tournament games over the weekend and sits one upset away from the school’s first men’s NCAA tourney bid in history.

Folks close to the program are, of course, stunned, surprised, shocked, and baffled by the success. Right?

Nope.

As a matter of fact, coach John Giannini and his 12-17 Black Bears went into the tourney figuring they might be one of the teams playing in Saturday’s nationally televised America East championship game. Game time for the UMaine-Boston University matchup at BU’s Case Gymnasium is 11:30 a.m. BU won both regular-season games against Maine – 61-59 in Orono, and 72-61 in Boston.

“We expected to be here,” senior standout Errick Greene said on Wednesday. “I really didn’t guarantee it, but I did kind of guarantee it.”

Giannini is more precise, and more mathematical in his assessment of the upsets his No. 5 Bears posted over No. 4 New Hampshire and No. 1 Vermont in Boston over the weekend – upsets that propelled his team into the league title matchup for the first time since 1994, and the third time ever.

“I don’t think any person who really is rational and who follows basketball should be that surprised for a couple of reasons,” Giannini said.

“In the first place, we were playing against teams in our bracket that we had already beaten,” he said.

Second, he said, is the fact that the Bears have struggled all season to adjust to a vastly different style than they spent the entire preseason expecting to play.

The loss of two potential starters (Huggy Dye to suspension, Ricky Green for personal reasons), along with an early-season car accident that sidelined starters Clayton Brown and Derrick Jackson, and a subsequent knee injury that put (you guessed it, starter) Rickey White on the shelf for five weeks, made Maine’s adjustment tough.

But the end result, and the abilities of the team Giannini has cobbled together, is becoming apparent … just in time.

“We’re completely different offensively [than I thought we’d be at the beginning of the season], but I think we have the four best defensive players that we’ve had since I’ve been here in Errick, Derrick, Rickey and Justin [Rowe],” Giannini said.

“I think that we have guys who work as consistently as we ever have. I think we’ve got guys who are as unselfish as we’ve ever had. I just think we’ve changed from an offensive team to more of a grind-it-out defensive team.”

Rowe, the Black Bears’ 7-foot center, said he’s just doing what he hoped to do when he decided to come to Orono: Play for a championship.

“It’s the biggest game I’ve ever played in in my life,” Rowe said. “I came to this school to play in games like this. So now I’ve got my chance. Let’s see what we can do with it. Let’s see if we can run with it.”

White, has emerged as a gritty inside force for the Bears in the nine games since returning from a seven-game rehab stint, averaging 9.6 points and 6.6 rebounds a contest. He said the Bears have finally merged into an intense, focused unit.

“We knew once we really started playing together, as a team, and everybody showed up the same night instead of a couple guys one night and a couple guys the next night, we’d be ready to get these two games,” White said of last weekend’s upsets.

And now, he said, the Bears are ready to continue the string.

“We really don’t have anything to lose,” White said. “So we’re just going out and playing with everything we have. Just balling, man. We want it, we waited for it, and it’s definitely our time. We just have to go out and seize the moment, like Coach G says.”