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ATLANTA -- Wake Forest cracked under pressure Friday night and swept the pieces of a shattered season back to Winston-Salem.

In a stunning exit from the ACC tournament, the second-seeded Deacons played their worst game of the season and lost 75-64 to Maryland. What comes next is anyone's guess.

Wake looked bewildered in its second straight one-and-out at the conference tournament and the fourth in six seasons. Where the Deacon end up in the NCAA tournament now is no longer up to them.

James Johnson said it was stage fright.

"Just like last year," the sophomore forward said.

Jeff Teague blamed it all on himself.

"I let my team down, and I told them that," the sophomore guard said.

The other explanations didn't make much sense. A team seemingly poised for a postseason run came out timid and tight. In a matter of minutes, it was all over. Maryland packed in a zone defense daring the Deacs to shoot, and Wake fired 25 shots from beyond an arc they had ignored pretty much all season.

At one point in the game, Teague fired a 3-pointer from 26 feet that slammed into the rim and bounced away. He was benched soon afterward.

Johnson slung up a similar shot minutes later, a desperate launch that caused coach Dino Gaudio to call his second timeout only four minutes into the game. Wake was down 15, and the ACC tournament was completely out of control.

North Carolina had opened the day hours earlier with a win over Virginia Tech that had no form or flow. It ended with Tech coach Seth Greenberg throwing his coat to the floor in disgust and making veiled references to the officiating afterward. Florida State then dispatched local darling Georgia Tech setting the stage for the night games.

A year ago, the Deacs walked out of the tournament after losing to a team they had beaten twice. Friday night, against a team it had beaten on the road 10 days ago, Wake was run out of the tournament.

"We had a lot of guys who had a little stage fright," Johnson said. "It happens. It happened to me last year."

He said it wasn't just one player. Johnson said that for whatever reason, once the game started Wake wasn't ready to play.

"That's all it was," he said. "It was just stage fright from the whole team. It seemed like we weren't playing Wake Forest basketball at first."

Wake Forest basketball is about layups and dunks, and faced with having to make up a deficit so early in the game the Deacs went away from that style. Even after cutting the lead before halftime, Wake never got back into its offense. When it was over, the Deacs had missed 22 of their 25 shots from beyond the 3-point line, some of them badly, all of them ricocheting and starting Maryland breaks that ultimately led to the Terps going up by 17 and turning the Wake plans into a confusing mix of timeouts.

The win at Maryland on March 3 came after a burst of offense sparked by a 1-3-1 zone defense that the Deacs tried one time Friday. Maryland burned it easily, and Gaudio never went back to it.

"We weren't going to try to trick them," Gaudio said. "We were going to what we do. That's our half-court man-to-man."

Maryland drove past Wake's defense and found open shooters. Maryland also outrebounded the Deacs, something that hadn't happened since Wake's stunning loss to N.C. State on Feb. 11. That loss, and a few others during an otherwise great season, was troubling because there seemed to be no logical explanation for it. Over a two-year period, Wake Forest has become as good as any team in the country but has revealed serious flaws, too.

On a day in the tournament when it was no longer clear which is the best team in the ACC, the Deacons crumbled. Entering a weekend in which it's no longer clear which is the best team anywhere in the country, the Deacons broke then shattered.

"I don't know what it was with the guys," Johnson said. "I know we weren't scared. I know we weren't scared. We were timid as a whole, as a team. I thought we had a chance to win the tournament, and that's probably what happened, too much thinking and not enough performing."

Wake's performance on a big stage Friday was disastrous, and now the Deacs have one week to put themselves back together and get ready to play on an even bigger stage with a lot of other teams that seem to be falling apart at the wrong time.

Contact Ed Hardin at 373-7069 or ed.hardin@news-record.com