By J.P. BUTLER
Special to the Era

DAYTON, Ohio — One month after this stretch began in earnest, the St. Bonaventure men’s basketball team is in rarefied air.
The Bonnies (11-2) have won eight straight games, the program’s longest winning streak since 1970-71. They have a share of the nation’s fourth-longest current win streak, trailing only the likes of national names West Virginia, Michigan State and Oklahoma.
At 4-0 on the road, they’re one of only 10 teams that are unbeaten in three or more true road contests this season.
Yes, Bona is riding high heading into its first Atlantic 10 road game of the season: A matchup with a transitioning Dayton team tonight (8:30 p.m., CBS Sports-TV, WPIG-FM) inside UD Arena.
But those accomplishments have only made it hungrier for more success, the team said.
“It just puts us on our toes even more,” senior Idris Taqqee said. “We definitely see it as an accomplishment, but we also know that we’ve gotta build on that, and that’s one thing I want to keep telling my teammates, and let them know that we’re doing good things, but we’ve gotta just keep building on it.
“We’ve gotta take it a game at a time, and that’s how those games will be special in the end.”
Added coach Mark Schmidt, whose team received seven points in the latest Associated Press Top 25 poll, placing it at No. 32 nationally: “I don’t think they’re caught up in that; at least I’m not caught up (in that).
“Our whole emphasis and focus has to be on Dayton. We can’t be worried about, ‘OK, we won eight games before that.’ Dayton doesn’t care if we won eight games or we lost eight games. We just have to do what we’re supposed to do.”
The Bonnies have had a tough go against the Flyers — one of the league’s banner programs for the better part of a decade — under Schmidt; They’re just 2-12 in those games since his arrival in 2007, although that includes the memorable road victory over a UD team that ranked No. 15 two years ago.
This year, however, the task may not be quite as daunting; In fact, in a building that’s served as a house of horrors for most opponents over the years, the Bonnies are actually a two-point favorite.
The Flyers lost both their coach — Archie Miller, now at Indiana — and core (guards Charles Cooke and Scoochie Smith and forward Kendall Pollard) from a team that went 102-36, won the last two A-10 regular season titles and reached four-straight NCAA Tournaments from 2014-17.
And, at the moment, Dayton’s as beatable as it’s been in years.
The Flyers, now led by former VCU and Alabama coach Anthony Grant, are currently 6-7 and coming off a 70-62 road loss to rebuilding Duquesne. They’ve already been taken down twice at home, by Auburn and Penn.
But while most outside the locker room see a game ripe for the taking, Bona still sees the name that has dominated for so long.
“It’s Dayton,” said Schmidt, whose team nearly knocked off the Flyers last year in UD Arena, as well, losing 76-72. “They have the best homecourt in the league, they have really good players. They’re good. Their record probably isn’t indicative (of that), but they’ve played a tough schedule.
“(Darrell) Davis is one of the best guards in the league; (Josh) Cunningham is one of the best big guys in the league. We’ve got to be able to play and play well.”
Role players on the last few tournament teams, Davis and Cunningham are now the leaders of a UD team that ranks No. 140 by KenPom, good for seventh in the A-10.
Davis, a 6-foot-5 guard, averages 17 points and four assists, while Cunningham, a 6-foot-7 forward, has been a force inside, averaging 16 points and 10 rebounds. After exploding for 32 and 28 points, respectively, in a conference-opening 98-78 triumph over UMass, the Bonnies’ Jaylen Adams (20.1 points) and Matt Mobley now rank third and fourth in the A-10 in scoring, while Davis ranks 11th and Cunningham 12th (and first in rebounding).
Despite a new coach and four new starters — Cunningham is the lone holdover while budding sophomore Xeyrius Williams has been relegated to a reserve role this season — the Flyers play largely the same way they did under Miller, Schmidt said.
“Same thing,” Schmidt said. “They’re pushing the ball, they’re trying to get the ball up the floor really quickly. They shoot the ball, they’re aggressive, (they play) aggressive man-to-man defense.
“They’re playing a little bit more zone, I guess, than they had in the past. They’re a good defensive team, they push the heck out of the basketball and they run a good offense.”
Added Taqqee, a sophomore starter on the team that won in UD Arena in February of 2016, “You can tell that they still have that same type of mentality about themselves. But it’s just the names on the back of the jerseys that have really changed.”
Bona, in search of the program’s first nine-game win streak since the Final Four season of 1969-70 and its first 12-2 start since 1999-00, has yet to lose a true road game this season, and owns wins over Maryland, Buffalo and Syracuse away from the Reilly Center.
How much might those experiences help it inside UD Arena, which averages close to 13,000 fans per game?
“We’ve had some success on the road; we know Dayton’s a whole different animal,” Schmidt said. “We’ve got to be able to make sure we control our emotions. We’ve got to make sure we handle adversity when the crowd gets up. When it gets loud, we can’t go faster.
“(The road success) will help us, but that’s not going to win the game for us.”
The Flyers may not necessarily be the feared opponent they’ve been in the last few years, but it would still be a key road win to have on the resume, Taqqee said.
“You definitely gotta put that down as a good win that you need,” he said. “It’s not nothing that everybody outside of the college basketball world sees that. Even though they’re down this year supposedly, that’s now how we’re looking at it. We’re going there, we’re not in the RC, so we gotta just look at it like that.”