SCHIMMEL: Pack your bags for St. Louis

The Terrapin women's basketball team should start looking for hotels in St. Louis.

The Terps should schedule their chartered flight, pack their bags and figure out when the best time will be to see the Gateway Arch.

With all due respect to Baylor, Louisville and Vanderbilt, there's just no way the Terps are going to lose in Raleigh.

The Terps play tomorrow afternoon and likely again Monday night in the Raleigh Regional semifinals and finals. They are two wins away from the Final Four.

And simply by looking at the way the Terps have been playing recently and looking at the opponents standing in their way, you have to feel like this trip to Raleigh is almost certainly going to end well.

Normally, a column like this might jinx a team during a postseason run. If that happens, I apologize in advance.

But, honestly, these Terps are virtually jinx-proof.

They've won 14 games in a row now, beating, among others, Duke (twice), North Carolina, Florida State, Rutgers, Virginia, Utah and Boston College (twice) during the streak.

They've beaten teams from the north, south, east and west.

They've won close games and blowouts, high-scoring games and low-scoring games.

They've won on their home court, in other teams' gyms and at neutral sites.

They've won in front of more than 16,000 fans at Comcast Center and in front of 914 fans at Miami.

The Terps have won games with balanced scoring, and they've won games when guards Kristi Toliver and Marissa Coleman provided the lion's share of the offense.

They've beaten any type of opponent imaginable in any way you can think of, and nobody else playing at the RBC Center this weekend makes you think the Terps' run will end there.

The Terps' next victim is No. 4 seed Vanderbilt, which enters the Sweet 16 on a five-game winning streak, including an SEC Tournament championship.

When the teams met in the same round of the NCAA Tournament last season, the chic thing to say before the game was perhaps the Commodores, also a No. 4 seed last year, were exactly the type of team that could give the Terps trouble, and an upset wouldn't be all that surprising.

Instead, the Terps cruised to an 80-66 win that was about as close as Spokane was exciting (i.e., not very close at all).

Plus the Commodores are without second leading scorer Hannah Tuomi because of a stress fracture in her left ankle.

And once the Terps win tomorrow, there would be nothing close to a Candice Wiggins-led Stanford team waiting for the Terps this year in the regional final like there was a year ago.

No. 3 seed Louisville is a very good team, and Cardinals coach Jeff Walz might know a thing or two about the way the Terps play from his time as an assistant coach under Frese from 2002 to 2007. They have an All-American in Angel McCoughtry and were ranked as high as No. 5 at multiple points this season.

But the Cardinals have been largely untested by their schedule, and the last few times they played a top-level team, they lost to Connecticut by 28 and 39 points in the teams' two meetings.

The Terps would be the better team in that matchup.

Louisville would be a tougher opponent than No. 2 seed Baylor, which has been forced to string together an improbable series of close wins since losing leading scorer and rebounder Danielle Wilson for the season with a knee injury Feb. 28.

They've squeaked out six wins in a row after losing the first game after Wilson's injury, but the Bears needed overtime to beat No. 15 seed Texas-San Antonio in the first round of the NCAA Tournament and beat No. 7 seed South Dakota State by just two points in round two.

So it really is the Terps' region to lose.

Obviously, anything can happen, but the smart money should be overwhelmingly on the Terps.

I wonder what St. Louis is like this time of year ...

schimmeldbk@gmail.com