DURHAM, N.C. — With 4 returning starters from a team that came within 20 minutes of winning the national championship last April, North Carolina was a logical choice to start this season as the nation’s No. 1 college basketball team.

But 3 months later, as we turn the calendar to February and the final month of the schedule, the questions must be asked:

Were the 2021-22 Tar Heels really that good? Or did they just put together 1 great month at just the right time?

All evidence thus far points to the latter.

Saturday’s 63-57 loss to rival Duke at Cameron Indoor Stadium dropped coach Hubert Davis’ enigmatic team to 15-8 overall and 7-5 in the ACC.

Considering that it took last season’s Tar Heels until mid-February to finally figure things out and start playing at a high level, their record — middling as it might be — shouldn’t be cause for panic.

At least not yet.

There should be plenty of concern, however, over the way UNC has arrived at this point.

Its issues aren’t the type that can be solved by flipping the switch that everyone seems to be waiting for the Tar Heels to engage. They’re issues that were exposed and exploited by the rival Blue Devils, starting with a lack of communication you wouldn’t expect from a group of players who have been together as long as these Tar Heels.

“I mean, they weren’t talking much all night,” Duke point guard Jeremy Roach said.

They also let themselves get pushed around by a more aggressive, more physical opponent, just as they did 3 nights earlier in a home loss to Pittsburgh.

Bothered by the Blue Devils’ long, talented stable of bigs, UNC was outrebounded 46-40 and had 11 shots blocked — 8 of them in a breakout performance by freshman Dereck Lively II.

What’s worse, the Tar Heels turned their own star center, ACC Player of the Year frontrunner Armando Bacot, into a ghost in the 2nd half.

Bacot had 12 points on 5-of-8 shooting in the 1st half but barely touched the ball from that point on. He was limited to 4 shots over the final 20 minutes and scored only once, on an alley-oop dunk from Puff Johnson in transition at the 12:14 mark.

Instead of playing to their team’s strength and going inside, guards Caleb Love and RJ Davis, along with forwards Pete Nance and Leaky Black, helped their opponent out by settling for a barrage of perimeter jumpers.

And yet, during a contentious postgame session with the media, Coach Davis seemed more concerned with the way the game was officiated than the way his team executed its offense.

“The stat that I’m looking at is going into the game we shot 150 more free throws than any other opponent in our conference,” he said. “And we shot three (Saturday), zero in the second half.”

UNC went 2 for 3 from the line. Duke was 11 of 15.

Asked why he thought his team received so few free throw opportunities, Davis snapped back by saying: “You answer it. We attacked the basket.”

But they didn’t.

The Tar Heels hoisted up 27 3-pointers, the same number as in Wednesday night’s loss to Pitt. They made only 7.

When a reporter suggested that Duke turned UNC into a 3-point shooting team, Davis — whose team entered the game ranked 302nd nationally from beyond the arc at 31.1% — replied: “That’s your opinion.”

What’s not an opinion is that there’s something glaringly missing from this Tar Heels team.

Perhaps it’s an urgency the team is saving up for the postseason, when it can dispense with the preliminaries and start chasing its “championship or bust” goal in earnest. Maybe its starting 5 is starting to wear down from the fatigue caused by Davis’ continued reluctance to develop his bench.

Or, more likely, it’s the absence of the 1 piece to the 2021-22 puzzle who didn’t come back.

Brady Manek wasn’t just a consistent inside-outside presence with a motor that always seemed on the verge of redlining. He was also a forceful presence who held his teammates accountable both on the court and in the locker room.

The offseason addition of the Northwestern transfer Nance was supposed to fill the void.

But the graduate stretch-4 hasn’t even been a reasonable facsimile of the player he was brought in to replace in either energy, leadership or performance. He was 1 of 10 from the floor, missing all 5 3-point attempts, and was a team-worst minus-10 in his 29 1/2 minutes on the court at Cameron on Saturday.

Things got so bad that Davis benched Nance in favor of Johnson for a long stretch of the 2nd half, hoping to find a spark that didn’t come.

Nance’s performance was especially disappointing because he had finally begun to show encouraging signs of progress over the 2 previous games. He isn’t the only 1 who’s taken a step backward.

This was a week set up for the Tar Heels to recapture their groove and begin building momentum toward the postseason. It started with an opportunity to avenge an earlier road loss and ended with an emotional rivalry that always seems to bring out their best.

Instead, the opposite happened.

UNC already has as many losses as it did for the entire regular season in 2021-22. And its next 4 games include 3 against teams currently above it in the ACC standings.

The good news for Davis and his team is that there’s still time for them to flip the switch and put together 1 great month, just as they did a year ago.

But they’d be wise not to wait too long to do it.