Sam Young defends Levance Fields in practice on March 25, 2009, in Boston before Pitt's Sweet Sixteen matchup against Xavier. (Matt Freed/Post-Gazette)

Everything the Panthers did in practice that season was rooted in competition, even the simplest, most elementary drills. Whether it was the backup who believed he deserved more playing time or the starter looking to assert his dominance, the players wouldn’t have had it any other way. Young men wired to thrive in such situations grew and developed in that crucible of hard close-outs, unwavering screens, and whatever scabs, bruises and burns came from clawing for every inch in a daily fight for superiority.

“Guys would be banged up and I would ask coach, ‘Hey, could we go a little lighter today?’” said Tony Salesi, the team’s athletic trainer. “Guys, if they knew they had a light practice, they couldn’t do it because they really would not compete in practice. They didn’t want to do drills. They wanted to go at one another.”

Trash talk was as much of a soundtrack to the practices as whistles and shoes squeaking on the court. Jermaine Dixon recalled Young blowing kisses at teammate Gilbert Brown, his usual defender in scrimmages, after he would make a shot. Levance Fields, the team’s point guard, embodied that playful (and sometimes not-so-playful) back-and-forth.

“He would come at me all the time like, ‘Listen, I’m going at you today. I don’t care about anything else,’” Ashton Gibbs said. “It wouldn’t be that. He would probably say it in a little more graphic wording.”

That intensity occasionally reached logical conclusions, when aggression and physicality would take on different, more volatile forms.

Fights would break out, or at least threaten to, every week, as Gibbs estimated. A particularly memorable and heated one occurred between Young and then-sophomore Gary McGhee, when the latter came down with a rebound and the former charged hard toward the glass, swinging his arms. McGhee didn’t recall catching Young with an elbow or anything malicious, but the mere act of a younger player challenging a senior star in that way was enough to enflame the already bubbling situation.

“Nobody would really step to him because that was just Sam,” McGhee said. “It wasn’t anything crazy, but guys compete and emotions run high.”

Whatever sense of perspective was lost in those moments of rage came into focus after a couple of seconds or after someone stepped in to intervene.

That Pitt team was tight, a group with on-court cohesiveness that stretched well beyond the gym. For Brandin Knight, a former Pitt standout and an assistant coach for that team, it was a familiar sight, as he and Jaron Brown were best friends but twice had fist fights in practice as players in the early 2000s.

Whether it was in Knight’s day or during the time he coached, that bond prevented whatever venom came from a fight from lingering.

“We got into a few scuffles, but two seconds later, we’re shaking hands and going at it again,” Wanamaker said. “There was never bad blood between anybody. It was like, ‘I’m going to get this off my chest real quick and then we’re right back to the money.’”

The architect of the practices, the conductor of the controlled chaos, was the team’s head coach, Jamie Dixon. A man with an understated public persona was, to his players, a source of constant energy and intensity in practice, traits off of which they fed.