Adam Fisher said the season doesn’t end on Jan. 16. He’s right, of course.

But regardless of how the rest of everything goes for Temple, the program and its fans will look back on the night as a pretty good time.

Looking for their first win over a ranked opponent in almost two years, the Owls played a tougher, better brand of basketball than No. 18 Memphis and held off the Tigers, 88-81, before a whiteout crowd of 5,719 fans Thursday night at the Liacouras Center.

Temple last beat a ranked team when the Owls knocked off No. 1 Houston on the road back on Jan. 22, 2023 in Aaron McKie’s final season. This time, Temple’s fans got to experience the fun at home and stormed the court. Hooter the Owl even enjoyed some crowd surfing for good measure.

Although Memphis (13-4, 3-1 American Athletic Conference) cut Temple’s 15-point second down to two points with a little less than six minutes to play and got within three about three minutes later, the Owls (11-6, 3-1) led for nearly 33 minutes, swiped 22 offensive rebounds and outrebounded the Tigers by a 49-25 margin, a significant development for a team that has certainly struggled in that department on most nights this season.

Jamal Mashburn Jr. led Temple with 21 points, shooting just 4 of 16 from the floor on a night when he also turned the ball over five times. But he also shot 11 of 12 from the foul line, and his lone three of the second half pushed Temple’s lead back out of five points after Memphis cut it to two with 5:57 to go. He hit the shot about 30 seconds after teammate Shane Dezonie rebounded Babatunde Durodola’s second miss from the foul line.

“That was a big dagger,” Memphis coach Penny Hardaway said of that sequence. “One of them.”

Dezonie was a thorn in Memphis’ side all night in posting his second consecutive double-double. This one included 15 points and 13 rebounds, eight of which came on the offensive end. He had 10 points and 15 boards in Temple’s road win Saturday at Rice.

It was just eight days ago that Temple blew a 10-point second-half lead and dropped a disappointing 80-79 road loss at ECU. Dezonie said that loss “built” the Owls and appears to have set them in the right direction for now.

“It’s really guys just coming together day and day,” said Dezonie, who knocked down two threes in the first half before grabbing five offensive rebounds in the second half. “We're jelling off the court and on the court. We took a loss at ECU, and that kind of built us. It helped us for the next game. We came back at Rice, won that game in a tough game, and I felt like in practice, we just kept jelling. We didn't hang our heads. We just kept working, and this was the result for today.”

The only blemish in the win came when reserve forward Elijah Gray checked out of the game at the 5:32 mark of the first half, holding his left hamstring as he walked off the floor and toward the locker room. He eventually returned to the bench for the second half but did so wearing black sweatpants and never reentered the game. Fisher said he didn’t have an update on the status of his 6-foot-8, 220-pound Fordham transfer, who scored five points and knocked down a three in eight minutes before getting hurt.

In Gray’s absence and with Durodola left to deal with Memphis big men Moussa Cisse and Dain Dainja, Fisher leaned on 7-1 Tulsa transfer Mohammed Keita, who scored his first three points of the season on a putback and by going 1 of 4 from the line. He also grabbed a pair of rebounds in a season-high 11 minutes.

“Our practice is so competitive,” Fisher said when asked about Keita. “We do two teams a lot, and everybody's out there live, so everybody knows what we're doing. And I think that really helps us. [Keita] prepared really well. We kind of thought he would play in this game with their size, so I thought he did an amazing job. He gave us a great 10-and-a-half minutes, and he was fantastic. But I think it's a great credit to him staying ready, staying in the moment, and then knowing your role. Everybody's role is different, and his role was screen, rebound, take up space and block shots. And he was awesome. Big for us tonight.”

Temple, which is now 7-0 at home, led for almost 13 minutes of the first half and took a 36-30 lead into the break behind 11 points from Mashburn and eight from Dezonie, who hit consecutive three pointers to give the Owls their largest lead of the half at nine at 32-23 as the three-minute mark of the first half approached.

Memphis, the American’s top-shooting three-point team at 40% coming into the game, shot just 3 of 11 from beyond the arc in the first half. Two of those makes from three came from guard Tyrese Hunter, who came into the game as the league’s best long-range shooter at nearly 44% from beyond the arc. The Texas transfer finished with 16 points but shot just 1 of 4 from three in the second half.

P.J. Haggerty, the American’s leading scorer, was stuck at 10 points with less than eight minutes to go after being held to just four shots and two points in the first half. He heated up down the stretch and finished with 21, with nine coming at the line. He also missed four foul shots in the second half on a night when both teams shot a less-than-stellar 21 of 34 from the free-throw line.

As Memphis continued to hang around late, Quante Berry and Zion Stanford hooked up on a pair of important buckets that helped Temple lock down the win. Stanford scored on a dunk via an assist from Berry with 1:48 to go to push the Owls’ lead back out to six, and then the Owls nicely executed a press break after a made free throw from Haggerty, with Stanford finding Berry for a layup 11 seconds later that made it an 80-73 ballgame with 1:15 left.

Berry, Temple’s most improved player, finished with 19 points on 8 of 12 shooting to go with three rebounds and three assists in 38 minutes, while Stanford added 10 points on 4 of 7 shooting with three rebounds and three assists of his own in 16 minutes off the bench.

Fisher, Dezonie and Berry took time to enjoy the win in the postgame press conference but seemed equally guarded about getting too high from the good vibes as they talked about the conference season ahead of them.

“It feels lovely to get a win,” Dezonie said, “but it’s another day.”

Temple hosts Tulane at 1 p.m. Sunday, two hours before the Eagles are set to host the Rams in a NFL Divisional Round playoff game about eight miles south down Broad Street.

Fisher said he was grateful for the crowd, saying it was the loudest he had heard the building all season, and knew how to play the hits ahead of Sunday’s game.

“It's a great credit to our marketing staff,” Fisher said when asked about the crowd. “I thought they did an amazing job getting the word out being on campus. Alums, emails. The crowd is huge. I hope they all come back Sunday, and then they all go watch the Eagles play. That'd be awesome. If we’ve got to put the Eagles game on the Jumbotron, whatever we’ve got to do to get them here, we'll do it. Or if the Eagles want to push their game back an hour, I'm OK with that too, but the crowd's awesome.

“This was an unbelievable environment tonight. I think we have - I said this to our team - really smart fans. You know when to get loud and then when not to and then when to get excited, but their energy was awesome. I hope that, again, they keep coming back. We want to protect home court, and that's been a big thing for us this year, and it's a huge credit our students, our alumni, our faculty. A lot of faculty were here tonight. It was awesome.”

Watch Thursday night's postgame press conference videos here.