The UTEP Miners women's basketball team prepares for a Conference USA game against Middle Tennessee Bret Bloomquist/El Paso Times
From the opening tip, this was supposed to be a season graded on a curve for the UTEP women's basketball game, a year where double-figure wins could rightly be regarded as progress.
Somewhere over the past month, that all began to change. Wins started accumulating, the light started flickering on, against expectations the Miners started realizing they could be a good basketball team.
The question now is how good, and a big piece of that answer will come noon Saturday when the traditional beast of Conference USA, Middle Tennessee, rolls into the Don Haskins Center.