They haven’t lost since before Christmas.
A few weeks might not seem like a long time in the grand scheme of things, but consider that the University of Maryland men’s basketball team has played and won six games since December 22, when they last lost, by four points to Seton Hall. Coach Mark Turgeon’s bunch has won 15 games this season and lost just three, beaten four projected NCAA tournament teams this month, and could jump into second place in the Big Ten conference standings this weekend.

“This team is doing amazing things,” Turgeon said after the latest win, a 74-70 thriller over Wisconsin on Monday night. And that was a few hours after the Terps entered the latest Associated Press national Top 25 poll, with a ranking of No. 19, their highest of the season.

So, in short, it’s time to start paying attention to the basketball happening in College Park. Their next game is at 6:30 tonight at Ohio State, available to watch on Fox Sports 1, followed by a bigger one Monday night at No. 6 Michigan State.

There’s the Big Three.
One goes by Bruno, and the others are freshman forward and Mount Saint Joseph’s alum Jalen Smith, and junior guard Anthony Cowan, Jr., from Bowie. In basketball, it often beneficial to have a Big Three, to make it that much harder for opponents to defend you, and Maryland has a talented trio.

Angola native and 6-foot-10, 240-pound sophomore Bruno Fernando is the reigning national player of the week and is averaging 14.6 points and 9.9 rebounds. He also seems to have a good head on his big shoulders for a college kid, tweeting things about integrity, being blessed, and great team wins.

Meanwhile, the 6-foot-10, 215-pound Smith, the two-time Maryland Gatorade Player of the Year as a junior and senior at Mt. St. Joe, has made an instant impact in his first year, averaging 12 points and seven rebounds.

And the guy with the hottest hand of late is Cowan, the Terps’ leading scorer with almost 18 points per game. He’s got Gary Williams’ seal of approval. Cowan has scored at least 20 in the last three games, and isn’t afraid of taking the big shot. His winner on Monday night was Melo Trimble 2.0. We could watch this four-second clip from 105.7 The Fan’s Joe Schiller all day long:

Free tickets for government employees was a great call.
The Maryland athletic department recently offered free tickets to federal government employees affected by the current government shutdown, and 747 people took them up on the deal by attending either the Terps’ women’s game last Saturday or the men’s game Monday. “This was a great chance to have a family outing, relieve some stress, and watch a great basketball game,” Therman Hawkins Jr., who attended Monday with his wife and 14-year-old son, told Maryland’s athletics website.

The way negotiations in D.C. are going (in the last two days Baltimore native Nancy Pelosi called for the postponement of the State of the Union address; the president, in turn, cancelled her trip to the Middle East to visit U.S. troops), Maryland might need to re-up the ticket offer for their next home game in eight days.

Bracket projections have UMD in the NCAA tournament.
When it comes time to fill out an office bracket for March Madness, oftentimes you’ll do just as well by picking teams whose uniforms you like rather than doing any serious research. In any case, it’s usually easier, and more fun, to pick a school that you’ve at least heard of. Need say we say more than UMBC, 2018?

Current bracket projections (yes, there are already these things) have the Terps as high as a No. 4 seed, meaning prognosticators think they’re one of the top 16 teams in the nation. Keep this up and Maryland alums will have a reason to call out sick to work in a few months to watch the Terps’ first-round tournament game.

To paraphrase Will Ferrell’s zany character in Zoolander (Are we dating ourselves? No one on the current team has probably ever seen the movie), the Terps are so hot right now. Jump on the bandwagon before it’s too late, and it looks like you’re simply a fair-weather fan in March.

Imagine being asked to work for the next month without pay and no set date for when it would come. This is the reality for 800,000 federal workers in the country during the partial government shutdown, which is now the longest in history at 24 days.

Nearly 172,000 Marylanders have been furloughed and are struggling to pay mortgages, rent, and utility bills. Mayor Catherine Pugh has taken action, calling for all major utility providers to waive late fees and allow more time for payment of bills for all furloughed federal employees in Baltimore City.

“I am continuing to reach to our financial institutions to urge their cooperation and accommodation for city residents affected by the prolonged furlough,” Pugh said in a statement on Monday. “It is unacceptable that federal employees have become pawns in what is clearly a political game. I urge the administration and members of Congress to get our government back to work for the citizens of Baltimore, the State of Maryland, and our entire nation.”

For residents like Treesa Gaither in Gwynn Oak, who works for the Internal Revenue Service and survived the last shutdown in 2013, Pugh’s statements don’t put her at ease. Gaither, who’s worked for the IRS for 10 years, learned that she would not be returning back to work on Friday, December 21, and has no way of accessing the documents she needs to benefit from the mayor’s help. She says that many of the lenders require a furlough letter that was sent to her work email that she can not access during the shutdown.

“What they fail to realize is that the actual companies and banks and financial institutions are making it difficult,” she said. “It doesn’t matter that the mayor says that, it doesn’t matter that OPM [Office of Personnel Management] has issued on their website a template that we could use. These companies are still not accepting a lot of these things—they’re not willing to help.”

Gaither has been selling crocheted hats and scarves to supplement her income. Similarly, Maryland residents Jaqi Wright and Nikki Howard have decided to turn their misfortune around—in the form of cheesecake. The sisters, who work for the Department of Justice and the FDA, respectively, created The Furlough Cheesecake after they learned that they were going to be unemployed during the government shutdown.

“We don’t know when this is going to end. We don’t have a clue,” said Howard. “But instead of dwelling on that and feeling the depression that tends to come with these kinds of situations, we’re making a decision to do something else.”

The idea came about during a New Year’s holiday party when the pair’s mother was so impressed their cheesecake baking skills. Wright and Howard began selling whole cheesecakes—original and sweet potato—for $29.98 each to provide for their families during this hard time. Both women have husbands who are unable to work due to disabilities, so they are the sole breadwinners in their families.

Gaither is also her family’s sole breadwinner and, while many federal employees are eligible for unemployment, she says that they aren’t expecting to receive the first checks until the end of the month. She’s been spending the majority of her days arguing and pleading with lenders and creditors to apply some flexibility to her accounts, but it has not been easy.

“One of the federal credit unions that we use told me that they couldn’t waive this month’s payment for us, but instead suggested that we take out another loan to pay it,” she said. “Can you believe that? They want us to take out another loan to pay a loan, that makes no sense at all.”

Thanks to her husband’s overtime pay, Gaither has been able to stay afloat, but that’s only a temporary fix. She is expecting to return to work on January 28 for the beginning of tax filing season, but with no pay in the foreseeable future—although she is hopeful that she will be paid retroactively for the hours worked during filing season.

“No matter who the president is, at the end of the day they are my commander in chief, that’s just what it is,” Gaither explained. “But when you’re telling 800,000 employees to work and not get paid or not get paid at all because of this one thing that you want, that’s a real problem. It’s pretty much a smack in the face to us.”