This is an opinion column.

Momentum is fickle.

One could argue the Alabama men’s basketball team had none a year ago as it departed for the NCAA tournament. That same one witnessed the program sprint through two weekends of wins to make its first Final Four appearance.

Momentum clearly meant nothing last March. Or the Crimson Tide generated its own when all inertia stalled.

That’s what makes the current situation so hard to read.

Alabama heads to the positivity capital of Northeast Ohio without much of a tailwind but with a glimmer of sunshine. The meat grinder that was the final few weeks of the SEC regular season and tournament is over and Robert Morris will feel like a gentle breeze from Lake Erie.

This is an Alabama team that last played a non-NCAA tournament team on Jan. 25. Of the last nine teams it faced, eight are currently ranked in the AP top 25. Four of the last five opponents are among the top six.

Not exactly conducive for stringing wins together.

But now’s the time when there’s no alternative, and this team that entered the season with a championship-or-bust mentality needs to rediscover that mojo.

“Anything short of a Final Four,” Alabama coach Nate Oats said Sunday, “would be a disappointment.”

It’s a time that requires the alphas to rise for the expectations to become reality.

That’s also where momentum is tricky.

Alabama’s unquestioned leader entering the season is fifth-year guard Mark Sears. His return from pacing the Final Four run was monumental and his efforts were rewarded Tuesday. He joined Brandon Miller (2023) as the only AP All-Americans in program history.

Perhaps that’ll be a boost for the Muscle Shoals product whose final Alabama season’s been a wild ride. Of course, it’s been dotted with highs but there have also been some dips. He took himself out of the second half of a Nov. 20 win over Illinois. Two months later, Oats benched him in the second half of an ugly 80-73 win over the last non-NCAA tournament opponent, LSU.

Oats then praised his response to that hiccup, but the left-handing shooting engine of the nation’s top-scoring offense (91.1 points per game) has been limited of late.

Since nailing 4 of 9 shots from 3-point range at Tennessee, Sears is 4-for-26 in the last four games. That’s 15.4%. He was shooting 36% from the perimeter in the 29 games before that — down from the 43.6% recorded a year ago — but Alabama figures to need a better success rate if they plan on two or three more weekends of basketball.

Sears had similar shooting skids earlier in the season and recovered from both. He went 7-for-25 in four games of conference play to go 5-for-11 to score 35 points at Missouri. In non-conference play, there was a 4-for-20 stretch over four games before finding the stroke against No. 1 seed Houston. Sears went 4-for-8 from 3 to score 24 points a game after sitting out the second half against Illinois.

“He’s a guy that needs to be in the gym getting his confidence up,” Oats said. “So that that’ll be a big factor. …It’s not like he’s lost his shot. When you’re as skilled as he is, and you just lose yourself in the game playing the right way on the defensive end, giving a really good effort on the defensive end, playing the right way on the offensive end, the shooting will take care of itself.

“And to me, it’s also an opportunity for Mark to prove he impacts the game on more than just shooting. How much can you impact the game can we win when you’re not shooting it particularly well?”

So Oats said Sears can rediscover that scoring momentum on the other end of the floor. And at times, he’s been elite.

Alabama’s also struggled defensively against some of the high-end teams they’ll have to negotiate to win a championship. Florida, now a betting favorite to claim the crown, took Alabama for 104 points in the SEC semifinal a week after dropping 99 on the Tide on Sears’ senior night.

The Crimson Tide had shown defensive improvement after Missouri went nuts in a 110-98 Alabama loss on Feb. 19 but regressed against a Gator team that’s No. 1 in KenPom’s offensive efficiency ranking.

Still, Alabama’s No. 32 defensive efficiency ranking is a big improvement from the No. 111 ranking it carried to last year’s Final Four. Luckily for the Tide, it wouldn’t see an offense as explosive as the last few it saw in SEC play until the second weekend of NCAA play.

So where does that leave this team?

Oats said after Saturday’s 104-82 blowout loss to Florida they needed to do some “soul searching” after a second-half disappearing act.

“Our players have to determine how bad they want to make a run,” Oats said Saturday in Nashville. “Because it’s really player-led led and the effort and toughness I saw in the second half isn’t going to get us very far.”

That’s a long way from the momentum Alabama carried out of last spring and into the beginning of this season.

The No. 2 team in the preseason polls slipped behind rival Auburn, the No. 1 overall seed and SEC regular-season champs. But legacies are made this time of year and the 2024 Final Four banner in Coleman Coliseum doesn’t mention the rough road traveled to that milestone.

No, the Crimson Tide didn’t need that tailwind last March, but the burden of expectation wasn’t necessarily what it is this time around.

Makes for some high-stakes drama that brews such an intoxicating batch of madness.

Momentum sold separately.

Michael Casagrande is a reporter for the Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @ByCasagrande or on Facebook.