HOUSTON — It was a shocking scene inside the Miami locker room at Houston’s NRG Stadium on Saturday night, the kind of scene you don’t expect to witness following a gutting loss in the Final Four.

After such a disappointing ending, you expect to see tears falling down cheeks, hearts strewn out on the locker room floor next to discarded chunks of athletic tape, faces droopier than a Botox convention, spirits somewhere outside in the dumps.

Not lifted like they were for the Hurricanes.

If there were tears Saturday night, cheeks were mostly dry by the time the locker room was opened and local and national media poured in.

Maybe it was the fact that the game was well-decided minutes, if not hours, before the final bell sounded. Maybe it is because the Hurricanes knew the chips were stacked against them against the stacked UConn Huskies. Maybe it was the appreciation of what was nothing short of Miami’s finest season in program history.

It wasn’t like the Canes’ locker room was a party after their 72-59 loss to favored UConn in the Final Four. But it wasn’t a funeral.

And that’s because the players inside that locker room know, this isn’t the end of something. It’s just the beginning.

*****

Does a piece of lumber cry when it runs into a buzzsaw?

Miami, the best team in the vaunted ACC this year, with the conference player of the year in Isaiah Wong, was the lumber in this equation, if that wasn’t obvious. They became just the latest talented squad to be chopped down by the Huskies.

Usually March Madness brings along with it a sense of chaos, maybe anarchy, to the even the best of teams. And 4th-seeded UConn did not enter this tournament as the best of teams.

Unranked in the preseason poll but receiving points, the Huskies debuted in the AP Top 25 in Week 1 after a 2-0 start. That 2-0 start blossomed into a 14-0 record and a No. 2 ranking by Dec. 28, including wins over then-No. 18 Alabama, Georgetown and Butler.

Then came a 10-point loss at Xavier on New Year’s Eve. And another loss 4 days later. Then after a win over Creighton, 3 more losses. Another win over Butler followed by another loss to Xavier. The Huskies went from 14-0 to 16-6 in the blink of an eye and almost out of the Top 25 entirely.

So of course UConn reeled off 9 wins in 10 games, only coming back down to earth in a 2-point loss to Marquette in the Big East Tournament.

Playing a host of good-but-not-great teams in the NCAA Tournament up until Saturday, the Huskies have stayed hot. Maybe scorching is the right word.

UConn’s margin of victory in its first 4 games — against 13-seed Iona, 5-seed Saint Mary’s, 8-seed Arkansas and 3-seed Gonzaga — was an otherworldly 90 points. Their 13 point margin-of-victory against Miami was the Huskies’ smallest margin in the tournament.

Miami was not immune to that. The Hurricanes had a fairly dominant Tournament themselves, and their margin before Saturday was +46. Just about half.

And then they ran into a wall.

“We beat Houston, and they were No. 1 for a lot of the season; you know, Texas was ranked really high throughout the season,” Miami’s Harlond Beverly said at his locker, head held high. “We had the confidence we could come in here and get it. Unfortunately that didn’t happen.

“The wall never feels good.”

*****

In another NRG Stadium locker room on Saturday night, you could’ve heard a pin drop, in between the sniffles.

What was a 14-point lead for Florida Atlantic dwindled to 1 with seconds left to play, and then came the ultimate dagger — a jumper by San Diego State’s Lamont Butler as time expired to lift the Aztecs into the title game.

After the game, the Owls were despondent.

Miami, meanwhile, was down by as much as 20 in the second half before cutting UConn’s lead to 8 with 11:41 left. Almost just as quickly, the Huskies built the lead back up to 16 points, and from there it was smooth sailing for UConn and a soft cushion for the Hurricanes.

“You come to that sense that time is running out, but you still try and still give it your all,” Miami freshman AJ Casey said. “It’s a heartbreaker, we wish we could’ve won, but UConn was just a better team today.”

Added Hurricanes guard Nigel Pack: “Ending the season is never a soft blow, regardless of how it goes. We’re all very confident in each other — 2 minutes, down 10, we still thought we could win, just because of all the hours we put in together. It sucks. But we’re mature, and we understand it comes with the game.”

*****

Most of all, what beat back the blues was the knowledge that this season’s Final Four run redefines what is possible in South Beach.

Just 1 year after the first Elite 8 run in program history, the Canes came back and did themselves one better.

That helps.

“We’re a really mature squad,” Pack said. ” The guys have gone through so much, we’ve done so many great things this year, that nobody should hold their head down. To be able win the ACC regular season, to make a Final Four, there should be nobody hanging their heads. We weren’t supposed to do any of this. Being able to help set this foundation, to play well the last couple years, now it’s going to be expected out of us. This is something I’m going to remember for the rest of my life.”

For others, it wasn’t the high of this season that they’ll remember. It was the ability to help Miami out of the lows.

“Knowing how bad a season can get really set that standard,” Beverly said. “We didn’t come into a team that had been winning the whole time, so when we ran into adversity, it was like, what do we do? Me, Isaiah (Wong), Anthony (Walker) — we were the freshmen who came in and went through those tough years. And having gone through that, it really made us tough, mentally and emotionally. Then, when we started having success, we know we can’t go back there.”

One loss does not send them back there.

Nor does it define these program-defining Canes.

“I tried to put the mindset in my teammates’ heads, don’t let 1 game define us,” Wooga Poplar said. “We came up short today, but you want to talk about all the other games we had? It was the wrong time to play like this, but this don’t define us.”