Jahvon Quinerly flew up the court, seconds remaining, the Memphis Tigers needing a shot to win and he . . .

Missed?

Wait. He really missed?

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He always makes those shots. And the Tigers always win.

But not tonight. Not on this this icy night at FedExForum, when there was no band, no cheerleaders, no massive crowd — and no joy, at the end.

Taking the court as a Top 10 team for the first time since November of 2021, the Tigers blew a 20-point lead and lost to a thoroughly mediocre South Florida team, 74-73. And then head coach Penny Hardaway spent the bulk of his postgame press conference alluding to mysterious but persistent chemistry issues that threaten to ruin a promising year.

“I don’t even know if this is going to be a wake-up call,” Hardaway said. “We’ve just got so many things that are going on that we’re just dealing with as we’re moving forward, that I hope by March it’s all gone.”

That bad, eh?

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“We’re in the huddles, and instead of talking about the other team, we’re trying to square things up. And it’s just too much,” Hardaway said.

And there’s more!

Asked about South Florida’s last play, when Kasean Pryor sprang wide open before being fouled, Hardaway again pointed to issues that have been simmering.

“With all the inner things happening on the team, the lineup that we had out on the court is probably the lineup that we should have had,” Hardaway said. “But there’s so much going on that you can’t play certain groups together and now you’ve got to go with a group. And now you’ve got a group out there that might not be as cohesive and you have a miscommunication problem.”

Yikes!

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This was not how the program’s “6th Mane” night was supposed to end. The night was supposed to be a celebration of the program’s passionate fan base plus (by happy coincidence!) the team’s ascendance into The Associated Press Top 10.

But then the snow arrived, and the ice, and the streets became increasingly treacherous. So Thursday afternoon — after the city asked residents to stay off roads — the university sent out a press release encouraging fans to “stay home and cheer on the Tigers on ESPN.”

A good 1,200 or so fans showed up anyway. The few, the proud, the nuts.

“We don’t miss Tiger games for nuthin’,” said Ryan Clark, 28, who has spent most of the week outside, loading airplanes for FedEx.

Clark and his father usually sit upstairs, in section 213. But on this night, everybody was invited to come down and sit wherever. So the Clarks sat on the first row, immediately behind the ESPN crew.

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“This is great,” said Clark.

Of course, that was before the second half started. But until then, everything really was great!

There was a fun vibe in the building. It felt like a grand adventure. The people in charge of game operations even pulled the national anthem singer from the crowd.

An hour before the game tipped, Josh Moore, the university’s assistant athletic director for marketing, was still looking for someone to sing.

“We had a student who couldn’t make it,” Moore said. “We then emailed every student, male or female, who had sung it in the last two years. We still didn’t get anyone. We’re going to start asking random fans.”

So that’s what they did. A random fan named Ashlee Rich, 22, said she’d give it a shot.

“I sang it at a high school baseball game once,” she said.

Let the record show that Rich knocked the anthem out of the park.

And then the game started, and the Tigers rolled to that 20-point lead, and it felt like a night nobody would ever forget.

But not in this way. Not because the Tigers somehow threw away a Top 10 ranking, a 10-game winning streak and much of the national good will they had generated since the season began.

“The team needs to be appreciative of having the opportunity to be in the Top Ten and have more pride in what we do and be more intentional about what we do instead of just trying to show up,” Hardaway said.

Which gets us to the really troublesome part of all this. Yes, even more troublesome than the loss. The loss will cost Memphis on Selection Sunday. The loss will make it harder to get a favorable seed. But Hardaway’s ominous comments suggest there may be more losses ahead.

It was really striking, to hear Hardaway’s frustration after the game. It was reminiscent of Hardaway’s press conference after the loss to Ole Miss in 2021.

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After that game, Hardaway said “Everybody’s trying to get to the NBA off the ranking we had, but nobody is willing to sacrifice minutes, touches, anything.”

After this game, Hardaway said: “The negativity of the talk starts to weigh on the team. It just makes you have to put certain guys out on the court. I’m not going to go deeply, but we’ve had this all year because you’ve got 14 new guys, 13 new guys trying to learn how to play together. And all these guys want the ball. And it’s offensive dribbling that makes guys not want to really play defense at the highest level if they’re not getting the ball and it becomes a problem. We’ve been able to mask it, but it’s there.”

Hardaway wouldn’t identify exactly which players were problematic. He kept all his references vague. But the idea that the head coach can’t play certain players with other players because of personality conflicts is alarming.

Oh, and then throw in the continuing saga of center Jordan Brown, who vanished from the team because he was “sick” but has recently expressed interest in rejoining the enterprise.

What did Hardaway have to say about Brown on Thursday?

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“Jordan is still out right now,” Hardaway said.

Glad that’s all cleared up!

It made for a surreal and stunning evening. And it hinted at unexpected peril ahead.

“I’ve been here,” said Hardaway, before heading out into the cold. “It doesn’t feel good at all.”