COLLEGE PARK — Buzz Williams was the first person to utter the name “Willard,” and that was 29 minutes into the news conference/pep rally celebrating Williams’ arrival as the fresh steward of Maryland men’s basketball.

The university did its darnedest Wednesday to whip up a spectacle that would purge the toxicity around its previous coach’s departure and project enthusiasm for a new day.

Maryland’s pep band blasted upbeat tunes. Cheerleaders danced. Fans watched from the first few rows of the Xfinity Center. A new slogan in huge white letters, “COLLEGE PARK IS BUZZING,” filled the LED strip on one end of the arena. Alumnus and ESPN anchor Scott Van Pelt narrated a video linking Williams to the great players and coaches of Terps’ past, with a concluding shot of the new coach — who’d been on campus all of 4 1/2 hours — grinning in front of the building where his team will play.

Gary Williams, still the only men’s basketball coach to bring a national title to College Park, blessed the new arrival from a seat in the front row of the audience.

Interim athletic director Colleen Sorem called Buzz Williams “the man who checked all of our boxes.”

This was performative page turning of the highest order, and who could blame Maryland officials after Kevin Willard torched the university’s athletic department on his way out the door to Villanova?

You would never have known that a different man still coached the Terps four days earlier or that university President Darryll J. Pines went to the wall to keep him in his job.

Pines pointedly did not mention Willard’s name when he congratulated the men’s and women’s basketball teams for making the Sweet 16.

“We’re moving on positively,” he said afterward. “We had a great season with our men’s and women’s basketball teams — first time they’ve ever been in the Sweet 16 at the same time. We’re super-excited about that. We wanted to turn this process around as quickly as possible, because of the fact that we wanted the new coach to interface with the existing players before they could get to the [transfer] portal. We weren’t fast enough, obviously, to do that, but now Buzz is here, ready to get to work.”

For his part, the new coach said he was “somewhat removed from civilization in general” with his Texas A&M team in the NCAA Tournament and thus not tuned into the drama Willard created as he publicly lamented the university’s lack of financial support for his program.

That’s hard to believe given the insular nature of the coaching profession and the fact Williams’ name began to be attached to the possible opening at Maryland days before Willard’s exit became official.

But Williams said there was “never any question” in his mind that Maryland will provide robust funding for men’s basketball, even if it has to balance that commitment with compensating athletes in a Big Ten football program.

“I’m at peace with all of it,” he said.

In other words, Willard’s agita was old news.

If anyone needed that reinforced with a visual cue, football coach Mike Locksley and women’s basketball coach Brenda Frese sat side-by-side, watching Williams’ introductory speech.

For all Maryland’s efforts to move on swiftly and emphatically, the question remains how much damage Willard did on his way out. He laid bare departmental infighting in what he initially cast as an effort to leverage more resources for his team. Ambivalence toward his methods quickly morphed into rage from the program’s fiercest supporters, who felt Willard shamed the Terps even as he knew he would be coaching Villanova in a few days.

His team staged the program’s most promising March Madness run in almost a decade, punctuated by freshman Derik Queen’s magical buzzer-beater against Colorado State. Why did Willard need to pollute the whole thing with his grievances if it wasn’t going to lead to any good anyway?

Maryland seemed set for a promising follow-up, with starting guards Ja’Kobi Gillespie and Rodney Rice expected back. Instead, within 24 hours of Willard’s exit, most of his team’s possible returning contributors were in the transfer portal.

Williams said he spoke to the team Wednesday morning, but he knows he will likely have to start almost from scratch. Asked about the makeup of his team, he said: “As soon as I can figure out who’s on the roster, that would be a place to start.”

He’d been off the recruiting trail for a whole 32 hours — precious time with the portal humming — but said he might get back to it Wednesday afternoon.

The timing of the succession, more than a week after the portal opened, means he’ll face a mad dash to assemble a 2025-26 team that might be competitive in the rugged Big Ten.

Gary Williams, still in many ways the patriarch of Maryland basketball, was asked how much the chaos and bitterness of the last two weeks will handicap the younger Williams’ start in College Park.

“I’ve thought a lot about that,” the former coach, now 80, said. “I think initially, it hurt, but as time went on during — it wasn’t a long process — but as time went on, I think people got the idea Maryland was there dollar-for-dollar with Villanova. It wasn’t a dollar thing why he left. That’s important, and it tells you something about the Maryland program that we were able to get a coach at his level that quick. A lot of schools couldn’t do that.”

Sorem made it clear that Buzz Williams’ record of making and advancing in the NCAA Tournament at three different schools factored heavily in putting him at the top of Maryland’s hiring list.

Part of moving on from Willard was finding a coach who could replicate his success in short order. It would be an upset if Williams can’t do that, given his record. He did not need ideal circumstances to win in three of the toughest leagues in the sport.

For Pines, who led the search hands-on, that trumped Williams’ lack of connections to the program’s past or the fact he has never lasted more than six years in one place.

“We knew our fan base wanted it,” Pines said. “We just had a big year of success, a very exciting year. … So we knew we had to find a person who had postseason experience. That was a high bar for us.”

The university’s leader is betting Williams will turn the winning faucet back on and that once he does, no one will much care how Kevin Willard left College Park.

Have a news tip? Contact Childs Walker at daviwalker@baltsun.com, 410-332-6893 and x.com/ChildsWalker.