MORGANTOWN — The question seemed to be relatively obvious, even though there was some room for argument, but among the media colony that descended upon the Coliseum for pre-Final Four interviews with the West Virginia basketball team there was one who wanted to know the turning point in the season for West Virginia.

Certainly he was fishing for some on court moment, a heroic basket by Da’Sean Butler most likely, seeing as he possessed six game-winning shots as the clock was winding down. But the truth be known, the turning point came not on the court at all, but off it, and at some ungodly hour when the downtown bars were full and the Coliseum floor empty.

First, though, a little history of what got them to that point, which then allowed them to get to this point, a showdown with Duke in the Mountaineers’ first Final Four appearance in 51 years.

West Virginia had lost to Connecticut on Feb. 22 in something of a lackluster performance, one which displeased coach Bob Huggins to no end.

Being honest if nothing else, Huggins let his team know about it.

“You have to man up and come together as a team,” he implored them.

It helped, for the Mountaineers turned around and beat Cincinnati, Georgetown and then Villanova to gain some momentum for the Big East Tournament.

The coaching staff had five days to get ready and after a couple of off days, they put the Mountaineers through their paces preparing for what they expected to be a confrontation with a red-hot Louisville team that had just upset Syracuse.

Surely, they reasoned, Louisville would beat Cincinnati and so most of the effort was place in that direction.

Then came Tuesday, the final practice before the team headed for New York.

“It was a 9 a.m. practice,” Joe Mazzulla would remember. “We can’t beat teams when we play them at noon.”

This is not a morning team and they went through a dreadful practice, the worst in months.

“We had scored on 9 of 33 possessions,” Mazzulla explained.

There are certain things Bob Huggins cannot stand and all of those things took place in this practice.

“I can’t stand to watch guys not do their best. When you don’t want to get better, you waste a day and why would anyone want to waste a day in their lives?” he said on Tuesday.

“He wanted to kick us out and not go to New York,” Cam Thoroughman explained.

It got worse, though.

Cincinnati upset Louisville.

Talk about a waste. All that film study of Louisville, all that prepartion, gone.

A meeting along about midnight was held to regroup and it was the Bob Huggins you see on the sideline when a call has gone against him — pointing, shouting, ranting — still upset about practice. Hell, still upset about the Connecticut loss.

“Da’Sean and I saw it, how much it hurt Huggins,” Mazzulla said.

“We had one bad practice and he went nuts,” Butler said.

“He definitely got our attention,” Thoroughman said.

It was, to be sure, a moment to remember, although Huggins says it doesn’t match the younger Huggins of his early days in Cincinnati.

“I run out of air now,” Huggins joked. “Believe me, they haven’t seen anything.”

They didn’t see, for example, the Huggins who had a confrontation with a media type before leaving for his first Final Four in Cincinnati. It was 1992 then and Huggins wasn’t quite sure how to approach things.

“I screwed some things up,” he admitted. “I told them I didn’t want to change things because I thought they’d get uptight.”

One thing he didn’t change was that they had open practices then.

Well, for this open practice about 12,000 people showed up. “Not very smart on my part,” he said.

One radio guy laid a portable phone on the floor during practice going back to an on-the-air radio show.

Huggins found out about that and, well, let’s let him tell it.

“Just say I showed great restraint not kicking his (behind),” Huggins said.

That was then, this, though, is now and Huggins knew that he had to strike fast and hard after that practice or his team would be heading home from the Big East Tournament in a hurry.

“We weren’t playing up to our potential,” Butler said. “He had told us we could be a special team if we really played hard and did things right and he said we were not playing like a special team. We were being a big disappointment. I stressed, Joe stressed we didn’t want to be a disappointment.”

That meeting turned heads and attitudes. It brought back the focus the team needed to enter one-and-done post-season play.

Yes, Butler’s heroic against Cincinnati and against Georgetown helped no end, but you want to know when the season turned, it was when Bob Huggins lit a midnight fire under his team.

E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.