WINONA, Minn. — The final score would seem to indicate that the Saint Mary's University men's basketball team didn't do much right in their season-opener against cross-town rival Winona State last Friday.

After all, when you drop a 95-61 decision like the Cardinals did Friday night, it's pretty hard to find any good points in your team's performance, right?

Wrong.

Despite the lopsided loss, first-year head coach Mark Lovelace found plenty of positives.

"That is probably the best team we will see all year — Winona State is a good Division II program," said Lovelace. "We just couldn't match up with their size, and they took full advantage of that. We'd get good looks at the basket and all of the sudden there would be an arm there altering our shot.

"(Winona State) is so much taller than we are used to shooting against," continued Lovelace, who got a team-high 15 points from Michael Batterman (Fond du Lac, Wis.) "Their size was a definite problem, but I still thought we did a lot of good things out there.

"We shot 73 percent from the free-throw line, which was a big weakness of this team a year ago," Lovelace added. "We forced 23 turnovers — which is awesome against a team the caliber of Winona State."

Unfortunately for the Cardinals, as good as those things were, there were some glaring weaknesses as well — the most obvious of which was an 18-for-66 performance from the field.

"I don't know of too many teams who are going to win many games shooting 26 percent from the field," said Lovelace. "We did not shoot the ball particularly well, and we struggled on the glass (getting outrebounded by 30)."

Yet, instead of being disappointed by those shortcomings, Lovelace is encouraged — after all, if their season-opening opponent didn't exploit those weaknesses, how would the Cardinals ever know what to improve on.

"This was a learning experience," said Lovelace. "We saw some things that we obviously need to work on, but we also saw a lot of positives. We're not going to dwell on the loss — we're going to use it as a teaching tool and learn from it."