The dog days of the college basketball season are late January.

You go from long breaks between games – 10 days for fall semester final exams, another week off for Christmas, another over New Year’s – to the grueling regularity of conference play, home one day, on the road the next, planes, buses, hotels, practices, film sessions, morning shootarounds, weights, rehab, fitness, more film sessions, elevation, snow, wind chill.

Then the spring semester starts and the campus fills up again, with all the incumbent distractions.

Your body wears down. Your mind wears down.

“This is a grind right now,” coach Brian Dutcher said.

The bus began creaking and swaying, the wheels began wobbling, a double-digit loss at New Mexico, a home loss against UNLV, a near-disaster at Air Force. And then, suddenly, the shaking stopped and the pavement smoothed – a 69-50 victory at altitude against Nevada in a place where they had lost two straight and five of the last seven.

“I just felt like there was a wall and we pushed through a wall tonight,” Dutcher said after his team held Nevada to 28 points through 31 minutes. “We’ve been going since July, seven months, and you hit a wall, physically, mentally, especially young guys, and we just felt we had to push through that wall.

“We had to push through all the stuff that hadn’t been going well, poor play, mental fatigue, push through and start getting better again. I thought we did tonight.”

It’s hard to know if it’s a seminal moment. It’s still a young team, and the primary characteristic of youth in college basketball is inconsistency and unpredictability.

But there’s a feeling among coaches and players that, maybe, just maybe, they – pick your metaphor – punched through a wall, turned a corner, got over a hump, scaled a mountain Saturday night at Lawlor Events Center.

“This is the stretch where you get fewer breaks, you’re practicing every day, classes start back up,” Miles Byrd said. “We just had an entire month (over the semester break) where we could focus strictly on basketball. Now there are more people on campus, and we have classes during the day, we have practices, and when we don’t have practices we have games. Our first off-day in 13 days will be Wednesday. It’s just being mentally tough.”

Said senior Kimo Ferrari: “This is the fourth time I’ve done it, and there’s definitely a wall. It’s when classes start and all that. But you have to push all that stuff aside and just recognize you have two more months left to do everything you can to be with your brothers and make one last push. We felt we got through it in Nevada. Now we have to build momentum from it.”

You’d think with a pair of home games against teams in the bottom half of the Mountain West standings – Tuesday against 3-6 San Jose State (7:40 p.m., Fox Sports 1) and Saturday against 3-6 Wyoming – that the Aztecs (13-5, 6-3) could string together some easy wins.

Except they’re playing at Viejas Arena, where they statistically, and counterintuitively, haven’t been as good as amid hostile confines of the road. They have already lost three times at Viejas, where they went 14-1, 15-1, 14-1, 13-2 and 14-1 in the previous five seasons.

“Fortunately or unfortunately, we’re better on the road this season,” said Dutcher, whose team is 7-2 away from Viejas. “Our key is now to go home and play better at home. And we can’t just assume we’ll play better at home, because we haven’t. We have to be more focused, more together, and not give up home court so easily.”

There is still the matter of rebounding, fouling and shooting slumps by leading scorers Byrd and Nick Boyd (a combined 3 of 24 on 3s in their last two games). But one thing that got fixed Saturday was the offensive flow, which had become more of a trickle.

They had 21 assists after not having more than 12 in any of the previous eight games, sharing the ball, moving it quicker, playing multiple sides of the floor, getting production from their bigs, resisting the temptation to launch deep 3s early in the shot clock, probing the defense, exploiting its mistakes.

It looked like SDSU circa … November.

“What helped us is we went back and watched what we were doing well at the beginning of the year,” Byrd said. “We watched the Creighton game, we watched the Houston game, we watched how we were moving offensively. There are those rough patches where opponents are getting a full scout on your team and they know what to take away, and you sometimes go away from what you used to do really well.”

Maybe the spark was Wayne McKinney III’s buzzer-beating layup in overtime at 3-17 Air Force that averted what would have been arguably their worst loss in at least three decades, maybe ever. Maybe it was the realization that their NCAA Tournament hopes were slipping away (and indeed, ESPN’s Joe Lunardi dropped them to the dreaded bubble in his projected bracket Friday). Maybe it was the individual meetings Dutcher held with everyone on the roster.

Maybe it was the day after Air Force, chartering home immediately after the game, flying into Brown Field near the border because it was past the nightly curfew at San Diego International Airport, not getting back to campus until 2:30 a.m., then having one of their best practices of the season that afternoon.

“Leading into Nevada,” Dutcher said, “I felt like the players were focused and concentrated a little bit more. Their focus just lasted longer. That’s young guys. It comes and goes. If we can keep them more focused and we make fewer mistakes, we’ll have a better chance of being successful. Focus is everything.

“You have to be mentally tough to endure it. Teams are no different than officials. They’re in the grind time, too. They’ve been calling games since November. They’re getting tired. They get yelled at every night, every night. They’re pushing through. Everybody involved in basketball now is grinding it out, trying to get to the stretch where you can see the barn and you know it’s close.”