Landers Nolley II pushed the ball ahead to DeAndre Williams, who rose and scored with a sweet-as-can-be finger roll.

But that wasn’t the best part. The best part was what happened a few feet away, on the bench. Moussa Cisse unleashed a merry two-step. Malcolm Dandridge and Damion Baugh banged against each other with joy. Jayden Hardaway rose to his feet in spontaneous applause.

Memphis bounces back with blowout of Wichita State

There was happiness at FedExForum. Undeniable, unadulterated happiness.

“It’s been a long time coming,” Memphis coach Penny Hardaway said. “It felt really good.”

The Tigers hammered Wichita State, 72-52, with an electric performance Thursday night that won’t lift them into NCAA tournament contention — not unless there are a whole lot more just like it — but has already lifted the mood.

“I’m happy,” Penny Hardaway said. “I don’t want to say anything negative about tonight.”

That sounds like a perfect plan.

Who needs negativity when Cisse just finished off his best game in a Memphis uniform?

When Lester Quinones just made one of the best scorers in the conference (Tyson Etienne) flat-out disappear?

Who needs negativity when Alex Lomax hit his first 3-pointer of the season? And followed that by hitting another one?

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“Man, it’s like a big relief,” Lomax said, referring less to the 3-pointers than to the entire team’s performance. “Because we have been trying hard.”

That last sentence isn’t as obvious as it might first appear. Lomax has a way of cutting to the truth.

Whatever the Tigers’ problems, they do not come from a lack of caring. The players desperately want to do well.

Indeed, that’s one reason it has been so painful to watch the team play this season. The frustration is palpable. 

Sure enough, the first half Thursday was more of the same, a comedy of turnovers and missed shots. It has gotten so bad for Memphis that TV commentators now openly mock the team’s offense.

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“They don’t even make the pass from point A to point B,” ESPN’s Dan Dakich said after Boogie Ellis couldn’t connect with D.J. Jeffries on a pass.

Later, when Jeffries missed Cisse on the break, Dakich offered: “It would be impossible for me to tell you what a bad pass that was.”

It was the same awkward bungling the Tigers have specialized in all season. As if the players were all trying to do too much — and trying to do just the right thing — all at the exact same time.

It has been a team turned in on itself, a living and breathing manifestation of self-doubt.

In the first half Thursday, Memphis was 3 of 19 on 2-pointers. On 2-pointers! It had gotten so bad, this collection of highly skilled, highly recruited basketball players couldn’t drop the simplest shots in the hoop.

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And then, suddenly, they could again.

Oh, what a blessed relief.

Quinones opened the second half with a driving layup. Then Nolley dropped a pass off to Cisse for a dunk. Then Williams spun through the lane for another bucket. Then Lomax found Williams who found Cisse for another dunk. 

It was as if all the practices finally had taken hold, as if all the instruction had finally sunk in.

Williams hit Cisse for yet another dunk. Then Lomax dove, drew the Wichita defender to him, and found Cisse for an emphatic alley-oop.

“Cisse dunked on the whole city of Wichita,” said Dakich, which captured it pretty well.

The Tigers scored on 11 of their first 12 possessions in the second half. They shot an easy 57.6 percent after the break.

“During that stretch it was more of an exhale,” Hardaway said. “You’ve got to understand, we’ve been doing this forever. All of a sudden, I started seeing what I had seen a long time ago, before we went to South Dakota.”

It’s impossible to say why it happened on this particular Thursday. Maybe it was just one, singular night. But Lomax, the thoughtful one, had a working theory.

“We’ve gotten closer, I think it’s the biggest thing for us,” he said. “It just came from guys wanting to go to the gym together, be more of a family. That’s the part that goes unnoticed with this team. The closer we are off the court and the closer we are as brothers, the better we’ll play and the more we’ll connect with each other.”

The hope is that all this good feeling will carry into the next stretch of the season. Starting Sunday against East Carolina, the Tigers play five games in 11 days. If they can carry the momentum from the second half of this game into those games, maybe they can begin to turn their disappointing season around.

But to do that, they’re going to have to play with the same unselfish swagger they played with Thursday night. As Lomax phrased it, “We just did a great job of seeing the next man smile.”