It’s not been easy to lose 20

You’re a player for Coppin State, and you turn on a talk show right now and hear critics ask how in the name of James Naismith a team with 20 losses can end up in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament.

They mean you.

But you know how.

You remember November when six of the first seven opponents were on the road, and you went against the likes of Kent State and Xavier, not to mention that 10,000-mile round trip to Hawaii to play one game. You were there hardly long enough to try on a lei, and lose by 21.

You remember December and that march of death through consecutive games at Arizona State, Ohio State, Dayton, Marquette, Indiana and Missouri. You understand that you couldn’t get a coach from a big-name team to do that with a bazooka held to his head.

You especially haven’t forgotten the weekend in the Midwest, where you played at Marquette Friday night and then tipped it off the next day at noon at Indiana. In between was maybe 13 hours, and that included five hours on a bus, rumbling down the interstate all night just to get from one place to the other, like this was a rock band tour.

Two games in 16 hours? That’s positively Georgia-like, only without a tornado. But at least Georgia didn’t have to do it on the other team’s home courts.

So you lost by 47 and 27, and then finally got some sleep back home in Baltimore.

Now you can look back at the long winter, with a travel record that looks like you’re running against Obama and Clinton. Thirty-six games, with 26 on the road. Forty-eight straight days without a home game in the middle of the schedule. Your season included games in 12 states and five time zones, and you don’t even want to think about the number of pizzas on a bus.

So you’re 16-20, and people question whether someone like you should even be in the field, when the ACC is getting only four teams, as if the pope should intervene in such gross injustice.

But then you think back to the night of Feb. 2, when your record was 4-19. Most teams would have crumbled like a sandcastle at high tide at that point, but you didn’t. Maybe you learned something, out there on the road.

Your coach is a booming-voiced, self-made success story with an unforgettable name. Ron “Fang” Mitchell. As a young man, he washed dishes to make his way, worked in an aluminum factory, manned the graveyard shift at a bank’s computer operations.

That unconventional path to becoming a college basketball coach can put steel in a man, so he regularly schedules his teams a winter of hard labor in hostile places, and expects them to learn to live with it.

Sometimes, you get worn down, and maybe that is why you played Ohio State to eight points, but 17 days later lost at Missouri 72-38.

But you just became conference champions by winning four games in five days in Raleigh, and that was cake compared to the season. You got to stay in one place. Your coach must have been expecting the success all along, because he bought five tailored suits in Raleigh, and planned on staying in town long enough to wear every one of them.

So now you’re in the opening-round game tonight in Dayton, Ohio, which is one of the two dozen places you have already seen this season.

Maybe your numbers aren’t that exciting. Your team shoots worse than 40 percent, averages fewer than 60 points, and has nearly 200 more turnovers than assists. Your average home attendance was 454, and Kentucky has more than that in its concession stand lines. Maybe the fans just assumed you were always on the road.

All that doesn’t sound like an NCAA tournament team, and neither does a 16-20 record. But can’t there be a corner of the bracket for the little guys who came through fire to earn a shot?

There should be. So you’ll play Mount Saint Mary’s tonight, and if you win, you’ll be back in Raleigh Friday going against mighty North Carolina in its own backyard.

But you won’t blink an eye.