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The best New Year’s Eve party I’ve ever been to, by far, was over a decade ago at a former workmate’s high-rise apartment near Downtown.

It was loud with abundant food and drink. At midnight, the DJ went retro and played REM’s “It’s The End of the World As We Know It” while a large group of happy, diverse and manic people danced, hips and shoulders bumping because so many tried to occupy too little space. The host had put out fliers, which obviously were effective. Once the front door opened for guests to arrive, the flow of partygoers kept it open the entire night, for hours.

The turnout was too much to control, and as you’d expect, there were inevitable casualties. The host’s really nice billiards table was one, it succumbing to spilled drinks and squatters’ scratchy pants. Some outside landscaping at the complex took a hit too.

The one bathroom, you don’t even want to know.

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I hadn’t thought about that night in years, until we all heard about Lobo JaQuan Lyle’s Saturday night party gone awry a few weeks ago.

In case you don’t know: While the Lyle-less Lobos were getting blown out at Nevada, Lyle stayed behind, ostensibly to nurse a knee injury.

But he also found time to rent an Airbnb house for his own party, and to market such party with digital fliers so that a large number of people turned out. Included were at least some of the UNM hoopers, already back from Nevada and apparently still in a partying mood despite getting worked by Steve Alford, Craig Neal & Co.

At some point way after midnight, and nothing good happens in public after midnight, “people were shooting at each other,” a police spokesperson said.

Surely the shooters were uninvited, and thankfully the two people who were shot, one a UNM softball player, didn’t sustain life-threatening injuries. But if Lyle is honest, and regardless of what an attorney might posit, he has to think he is at least partially responsible. He held the event and, as it were, propped the door open.

Lyle has been suspended since, maybe for the horrible optics if nothing else, and has apologized profusely on social media. If he violated any NCAA rules in the whole operation, UNM has not said, but maybe more will come out.

The Lyle fiasco is only the latest for UNM hoops that required police intervention, of course. Add that to the legal difficulties facing the dismissed Carlton Bragg and the suspended J.J. Caldwell, and that’s three of the team’s best players.

Caldwell, who had been kicked out of the Texas A&M program, faces a domestic abuse allegation that is stuck, for the moment, with a district attorney in Alamogordo. Bragg already was fighting off a sexual assault allegation when he was arrested for drunken driving. He had been asked to move on from the programs at Kansas and Arizona State.

The other commonalities for the three are that each is a transfer who came with baggage. Lyle is in his third year at UNM, by all accounts an impressively smart guy, and, to be clear, has not gotten into any trouble here. But he quit at Ohio State and had been arrested for public intoxication and disorderly conduct shortly thereafter.

To be clear again, I support second chances and have used this space previously to champion such. But the more chances you give, the more the risk outweighs the reward.

This instead is a cautionary tale that when Paul Weir and his peers prop the door open, they’d better be certain not to invite trouble.

Weir, meanwhile, looks at the Lobos’ Mountain West Conference competition and sees San Diego State – 23-0, ranked fourth nationally, and three of its top five scorers also came from other D-1 schools. He sees Nevada, which built a two-year powerhouse with transfers – a Sweet Sixteen season two years ago, 29-5 last season. Even New Mexico State has built a nice team with lots of second-chance guys, including senior Terrell Brown, who left San Jose State after he was one of five people arrested for robbing a man and using his credit card in California.

So it can be done this way, and maybe even here, with guys who need a port in the storm or greener grass in the brown of the high desert, whichever metaphor suits you.

And my guess is Weir will keep trying, despite the way these players have embarrassed the program. He’s a bright guy – I keep hearing on the radio he’s a doctor, though he can’t stop the bleeding when other teams start hitting 3s. And probably he’s not a math Ph.D.; when the off-court issues are greater than the on-court triumphs, the problem can’t be solved.

Lyle and maybe the injured Vance Jackson will be back Saturday at home vs. Wyoming. A win over the league’s worst team won’t prove much, but would be welcome after 1-5 over the last six.

It just feels like this team, still with a nice 16-8 record but without Caldwell and Bragg, has a lower ceiling.

As for the fan base with perpetually grandiose expectations, maybe it’s not The End of the World As We Know It.

But who feels fine?