With only two weeks left in Georgia Tech’s basketball season, and about a month before the baseball season begins, there is something you should know about Brian Gregory.

“I’m a Cubs fan,” he said. “So this is nothing.”

Gregory is one of those perpetually optimistic guys. It could rain bricks on his head and he would declare, “Oh good -- I need these to build a wall.”

Fortunately for Tech supporters, there is basis for his optimism.  The Yellow Jackets are not great. They're often not even good. But at this point of the timeline, that’s OK. Even blind loyalists couldn’t have realistically projected much better than a 14-12 overall record and 4-10 in the ACC going into the last four games.

Tech gutted its on-campus arena before constructing one of the nicest sports venues in the area. But programs take longer to gut-and-build than arenas. There are pesky nuances to dealing with human beings. Issues can’t be resolved with trips to Home Depot.

It would be different if a contractor had to stand outside McCamish Pavilion after 17 months and then begin communicating telepathically with the structure on how not to turn over the ball in the last two minutes and closed with: "Come on, concrete and steel, let's build a winning culture!"

Tech was a mess for a while. We’re still seeing the residual of that. Gregory has won as many ACC games as he did a year ago (four, with four tries to go) but the Jackets are only 8-22 in his two seasons. This will be the Jackets' 13^th ACC losing season in 17 years (one 9-7 season, three at 8-8). It will be the fifth time in six seasons the team missed the NCAA tournament (barring a giant hand reaching down from the heavens in the ACC tournament).

The positive: Gregory actually appears to be building something. The Jackets’ three leading scorers in ACC games all are freshmen: Marcus Georges-Hunt, Robert Carter Jr. and Chris Bolden.

These final four games, beginning Wednesday night against Maryland, and the expected cameo appearance in the ACC tournament in Greensboro, N.C., are worth paying attention to because they could provide a hint for next season. For the first time in years, the Jackets could create some sense of momentum going into a season.

“I knew the challenge that was at hand,” Gregory said. “Maybe you don’t know everything until you get here, but we’re making progress, the inner-workings of the program are for the better, and I like the commitment level of the players. It never goes as fast as you would want or the supporters would want, but I see progress being made.”

There have been several narrow defeats and late-game fizzles. There have been too many turnovers and an awful home overtime defeat to Virginia Tech that left Gregory said "as low as I've ever been." But the mistakes go with having young and inexperienced players in a program that has suffered too much losing. At times, Gregory has had to be be more psychologist than coach.

“Sometimes you believe that if you do all of the right things that you’ll automatically win games,” he said. “Unfortunately it doesn’t work like that. It takes time. But down the road it pays off. We live in a society that wants everything now, and I understand that. But given where we were as a program, that wasn’t going to be the case.”

He had three initial objectives for his team: 1) play hard; 2) play defense; 3) play together. For the most part, he has succeeded.

"I’m always cautious about talking about what happened before I got here," he said. "But I’m not sure you could say that watching some of the teams before I got here, that guys didn’t play selfishly. As long as we do those three things in the last four games and into the ACC tournament, and with some guys coming in and coming back next year, we’ve laid some groundwork to take a big jump going into next year."

There's always next year. It's a common refrain for Cubs fans. But Gregory actually has a chance for this run of misery to end.