It’s time.

We’ve been hearing about the talent on this Providence College team for three years now.

We’ve been hearing that this is a team that’s underachieved, a team in which the whole has never lived up to the sum of the parts.

We’ve been hearing that this is a team that should be better, an experienced team that’s played a lot of games together, one that’s finally ready to make its mark in the Big East, as tough as it is.

Well, guess what.

That time starts now.

For this is the last roundup for Geoff McDermott, Weyinmi Efejuku, Randall Hanke, Jonathan Kale and Jeff Xavier. Sometimes it seems as if they’ve been around forever, the first four anyway. And they’ve had their moments, no question about that. They have beaten highly touted UConn three times in a row. They have had nights when you looked at them and wondered why they weren’t more successful, even if they are in a monster of a league that takes no prisoners.

And there’s the sense they’ve been worn down by all this, that there’s simply been too many disappointments, too many lost hopes, too much promise that never got actualized. A team that saw Tim Welsh get fired last year because he didn’t win enough games, a team that knows all too well that the perception is that it’s underachieved. A team that’s played much of this young season with a certain pressure hovering over them, one that comes from people’s expectations.

That’s Keno Davis’ theory anyway, and he first publicly expressed it after Wednesday’s win over St. John’s.

“We need to be pressure free,” he said.

His premise was that this team was playing as if the disappointments of the past were sitting on the bench with them, baggage that could feel too heavy at times, as if it is not only trying to win now, but to atone for the sins of the past.

He also said, interestingly enough, that when he first came here he was surprised that people here thought this team was better than people around the country did, as though there was a certain disconnect.

Welcome to Providence, Keno Davis.

Where the expectations rain down heavy.

Where the ghosts of the past always are in play, fair or not.

That’s always been the dirty little secret of this team. It is not without talent. Not in the least. Geoff McDermott might be as versatile as any player in the Big East, complete with the numbers to prove it. There’s not a team in the league that wouldn’t take Weyinmi Efejuku. Two years ago, Sharaud Curry was one of the elite young point guards in the Big East. Marshon Brooks, an emerging talent on the rise, in the midst of a breakout season.

But how well that talent fits together always has been part of the problem.

The fact that, outside of McDermott, all of the above are finesse players, finesse players in a smash-mouth league, which has always been part of the problem.

Consider this: Two years ago, the Friars had most of those same players, all revolving around the 6-foot-9 Herbert Hill, the leading scorer in the Big East and a second-round draft pick, and lost in the first round of the NIT.

Last year, with Hill gone and Curry out for the year, the Friars finished 15-16.

These are the facts, as cold as they might sound.

The other fact?

The Friars were a consensus preseason pick to finish 10th in the Big East, and the reality is that you can finish 10th in the Big East and still be a very good team.

That’s the other disconnect around here, of course, the sense that the Friars are in a league where nine teams are currently in the top 25 in the coaches’ poll. Sometimes you wonder if people really understand that, realize how difficult the Big East has become, that this new enlarged version can eat its young.

Is it any wonder that a team would feel pressure?

In the last few days, both Curry and Efejuku have admitted they feel it, not so much individually, but collectively.

“I think so,” Curry said. “There are high expectations.”

“I feel we need to win,” Efejuku said.

They both are right.

This is a veteran team, a team that’s teased us for three years now, some flashes here, some flashes there, splashes of color against the gray of mediocrity it’s had in the Big East. What it’s never been able to do in the last three years is show it can consistently win on the road, or prove that, defensively anyway, they are tough enough to consistently beat good Big East teams.

That’s the challenge that begins tomorrow night in Cincinnati, the kind of game the Friars have to win if this season is to end up being a memorable one, another team that’s trying to get into the league’s first division.

The first two games were the kind of games the Friars had to win, at home to St. John’s and DePaul.

Now come two on the road, including Saturday at Georgetown, the kind of game that will be a reality test for any team, not merely one that knows it has never lived up to expectations, whether those expectations are fair or not. A journey into this basketball heart of darkness known as the Big East schedule, a journey that’s going to determine whether this team meets its promise or forever remains a tease.

Keno Davis says his Friars are appreciably better than they were at the beginning of the year, that they are ready to be successful in the Big East.

We’re about to find out.

For it’s time.

breynold@projo.com