NEW YORK — Statistically speaking, James Madison knew it would beat Wisconsin — or felt it had a very good chance to — with about 1:20 left in the first half Friday night.

That was when, after Michael Green III scooped up a loose ball, the Dukes had stopped the Badgers on three straight possessions for the seventh time. They call three consecutive stops a “lock.” For a while, going back to his Georgia Southern days, Coach Mark Byington has told his players it takes seven locks to win. Some of it’s simple math. Seven means a minimum 21 stops across 40 minutes. Add the other stops throughout the game, and it means Byington’s offenses have to seriously flop to not outscore those of the opponents. No. 12 seed JMU is 32-3 with an NCAA tournament round-of-32 date scheduled with No. 4 seed Duke in Brooklyn on Sunday. This offense doesn’t flop much.

But locks are about momentum, too, even if momentum is impossible to measure. When it’s coming, when the Dukes are one stop away, the bench leans forward. The defense might push the tiniest bit harder. Jordan Thomas, a graduate assistant, gets his pencil ready. If it’s the second lock, they need five more. If it’s the sixth, they’re almost there.

And then sometimes the Dukes get all seven by halftime, when they blast a Big Ten team by double digits on national television.

“The thing with locks is we know exactly what we need to do,” senior guard Noah Freidel said. “It’s a team-wide goal everyone gets behind. It fires us the hell up.”

“When I first started at JMU, we had a grad assistant who wore chains around his neck and a lock for every time we got one,” Byington said. “I lost that. … He’s at Florida now. I think he took the locks with him.”

So about those locks.

When Byington took the JMU job in 2020, he asked grad assistant Jordan Talley to locate some combination locks. At Georgia Southern, Byington had used them as a visual representation of the team’s defensive philosophy. Talley, young and enterprising, took it all a step further.

At a Hobby Lobby in Harrisonburg, Va., he went on a shopping spree, buying seven locks, six purple plastic chains and a much bigger gold chain made of much harder plastic. Checking out, Talley looked as if he were throwing a Mardi Gras party. What he didn’t know: Byington would have him wear all seven chains, locks attached, during games.

“Then each time we got a lock, I would take one of the chains off,” Talley said in a phone interview Thursday. “I wanted them to get locks so badly, just so I didn’t have to look so goofy on the bench. And when they got the last one, I would take that giant gold chain and put it on someone else. Sometimes it was a walk-on, sometimes a manager. At that point, everyone is just so excited. Because we knew that with our offense — Coach B is such a wizard offensively — that if we got that seventh lock it would be very, very difficult to beat us.”

For decades, coaches have brainstormed what to call three consecutive stops. At Florida, where Talley is now a player development assistant, they say kills (a common name). The Gators need six to win, per their calculations, though their season is over after a 102-100 loss to Colorado in the round of 64 on Friday. Other teams have used turkey, just like when someone bowls three strikes in a row.

Locks, Byington’s choice, don’t show up much in Google searches. Neither do JMU’s locks chains, because that’s mostly a modern football tradition. Talley, a Florida native, a college football fan by birthright, was inspired by Miami’s gold turnover chain from 2017. He also swears he didn’t take the locks with him to Gainesville.

“No, no, no!” he said through laughter, his voice leaping an octave. “Why would I take them with me? After wearing them so much, I did not want to see those locks anymore. I thought it would be a rite of passage for the GAs coming after me. I need to call Coach B, man. If the new GAs aren’t wearing those chains, I really need to call Coach B.”

Where are they, then?

“They’re probably in the drawer I left them in, the bottom one of my desk,” Talley said. “That’s where I would look.”

If James Madison beats Duke on Sunday, maybe that’s a project for this week, a scavenger hunt for a clump of steel and plastic. But this team is already thriving without the props. Against Wisconsin, the Dukes forced 19 turnovers — the Badgers’ most of the season — and had 14 steals. Early on, Freidel sensed the refs were letting them play a little, meaning JMU could add more physicality to its plan of smothering Wisconsin’s ballhandlers.

Bodies kept colliding. The locks piled up. JMU logged nine total, though the first seven led directly to a 15-point lead. Wisconsin never got closer than six in the second half.

At the end of the night, Byington stood in a near-empty Barclays Center, only his players and the cleaning crew around. He had just finished a few television interviews. He was antsy to start preparing for Duke, which had a slight head start by watching JMU beat the Badgers after its victory over Vermont. Two Blue Devils coaches had taken pages of notes from press row. In the hours ahead, as Friday night became Saturday morning, members of Byington’s staff would tear through film and do the same. And when they watched the Dukes, their defense, they would see five guys flying, stacking stops

“The locks that come with a steal are huge for us,” Byington said. “We really do need to find those chains.”