When your team has won 45 straight home games, after a while each win begins to look the same.
Ute diehards who showed up on New Year's night might have thought the Utes' 73-56 win over Southern Utah looked a lot like Thursday's win over Wisconsin-Milwaukee or Tuesday's win over Oregon State or earlier wins over Utah State, Augusta State and Chicago State.
Hanno Mottola scored at least 20 points for the fourth straight game (with exactly 20), the Utes kept up their hot shooting with 51 percent from the field and they got far enough ahead in the second half that about half the Huntsman Center fans went home early.
Yet there's always something a little different in each game and Saturday' victory on the first day of the new millennium featured a couple of new storylines.
Such as Alex Jensen scoring all of his 15 points from 3-point range by making a career-high five 3-pointers. And that 7-footer known more lately for his swimming than his basketball playing — Nate Althoff — making an appearance and getting 13 points and eight rebounds in only 17 minutes of action.
Jensen, Althoff, Mottola, Jeff Johnsen and Phil Cullen scored 60 of the Utes' 73 points, while the four Ute guards combined for only 4 of 14 from the field for 13 points.
Most of coach Rick Majerus' postgame talk centered on Utah's big three of Jensen, Althoff and Mottola.
"Al is a helluva shooter — I wish Al thought as much about himself as I think of him," said Majerus. "To me, Al can't look to score enough. He's never going to take a bad shot. He's got the disease of John Stockton, he's unselfish to a fault. Tonight he looked for the shots, took the shots and made the shots."
SUU coach coach Bill Evans said, "If they were going to make a three, we wanted it to be in the corner, believe it or not. Give credit to Alex for stepping up and making the shots."
As for Althoff and Mottola, Majerus wasn't as impressed.
When asked about Althoff's fine stat line after returning from an ankle injury suffered two weeks ago, Majerus replied, "Yeah, but who's he playing against? Everything is compared to what?"
As for Mottola, Majerus was unhappy with his attitude early in the game when the Utes started slowly — again — and fell behind the boys from Cedar City.
"With Hanno, sometimes he takes things for granted," he said. "I would point the finger at Hanno for not appreciating what an honor and privilege it is to be able to play a game, to savor the specialness of that. I think it was indicative of his play in the first couple of minutes."
Mottola did bounce back to lead his team in scoring for the fourth straight game and come up with a season high 10 rebounds.
The T-Birds were led by Jeff Monaco with 13 points and former Ute Tyson Hancock and Fred House with 12 apiece.
Hancock played two years on the Ute gray squad around two years on an LDS mission. He was good enough that Majerus suggested he play major college ball, and after going to Snow College, he ended up at SUU.
"It was fun to come back and see all my old friends like Hanno, Nate, Jeff Johnsen and Mike Puzey," said Hancock.
After a couple of sluggish starts in a row, the Utes were determined to get off to a quicker start Saturday night, but it didn't happen as SUU jumped out to an 8-3 lead as the Utes missed five of their first six shots and made a turnover.
However, the Utes gradually found holes in the T-Birds' 1-3-1 matchup zone and started getting easy baskets inside. A run of 11 straight points gave the Utes a 32-16 lead before they settled for a 37-27 halftime lead. The Utes played good defense, but SUU seemed content to just fire away from 3-point range where they made just 2 of 11.
"In the first half we were not as patient as we needed to be," said Evans. "But they're very good defensively, and they force you into things you don't want to do."
In the second half the Ute lead stayed between 11 and 17 as they could never pull away from the pesky T-Birds but never let SUU threaten them.
With nine home games under their belts already, the Utes will embark on a weeklong road trip Tuesday night. They'll play at Louisville Thursday night and then head to San Diego, where they'll meet San Diego State Monday night.
UTE NOTES: Utah's last home loss was three years ago, on Dec. 31, 1996, when Wake Forest and Tim Duncan defeated the Utes and Keith Van Horn 70-59 . . . Utah is now 3-0 against Southern Utah with other wins coming in 1996 and 1997 . . . SUU plays home league games this week against Valparaiso and IUPUI.