Pitt closed out final exams week without much of a test.

The No. 3 Panthers treated Maryland-Baltimore County like a second-grade spelling bee Saturday night.

UMBC may as well have been UPMC.

Pitt returned to the court for the first time in seven days with another blowout victory, this time thumping the overwhelmed Retrievers, 91-56, at Petersen Events Center.

It could have been worse. Pitt’s best three players — Sam Young, Levance Fields and DeJuan Blair — sat the final 10:53 of Pitt’s most lopsided victory in a season packed with them.

“It’s time for us to start progressing as a team and maybe we can take on the Big East,” said Young, who scored a game-high 19 points. “I think we can do it.”

Pitt broke out of its season-long outside shooting slump by making 14 3-pointers – on 27 attempts – against UMBC’s match-up zone defense. It equaled the Panthers’ single-game high under coach Jamie Dixon and was two shy of the school record of 16, set against Notre Dame on Jan. 29, 1997

Pitt had entered the game 183rd in the nation in 3-point shooting percentage (33.1)

and 226th in 3-pointers per game (5.4)

“It was a long time coming as far as our shooting today,” Dixon said. “We’re a better shooting team than we’ve shot.”

Seven different Pitt players hit 3-pointers, from Jermaine Dixon’s trey to give the Panthers the lead for good 4:30 into the game to Fields’ first-half buzzer beater to back-up fan favorite Tim Frye’s bomb in the waning moments of the blowout victory. Five players scored in double figures for Pitt, which has won its first 10 games by an average margin of 23 points.

About the only dramatics in the second half was how many dunks could back-up center Gary McGhee wrack up. He finished with six points (two dunks) and a career-high eight rebounds.

“We played a very good basketball team tonight,” UMBC coach Randy Monroe said. “I was proud of my guys. I thought our guys really played about as well as they could play.”

Blair had 12 points and eight rebounds, and Fields went 4 of 5 from the floor, including 3 for 3 from behind the arc, and scored 11 points.

Off the bench, sophomore Gilbert Brown had 13 points, four assists and three rebounds, and freshman Ashton Gibbs scored a career-high 13 points in 11 minutes.

Pitt came out cold and missed its first five shots and trailed 5-0 three minutes into the game. But the Panthers – getting consistenly open shots as UMBC’s zone focused on taking away Blair inside and Young’s slashing drives – started to find their mark. They made six of their final nine 3-point attempts in the first half and led by as many as 17 points in the first half.

“They forced us to shoot 3s,” Young said. “We took a couple and got hot, and we kept going.”

Monroe, whose team won 24 games last season and played Georgetown in the first round of the NCAA Tournament, figured that taking away Pitt’s powerful inside game was his team’s only chance at the monumental upset.

“We said, ‘Look, if we’re going to lose, let’s lose with them beating us from the outside,”’ he said, “and they did.”

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