ST. BONAVENTURE, N.Y. — In a season marked by the myriad Ls in the won-lost column, there were slivers, here and there, that could be viewed as real progress during the return season of Jim Crowley.

The most notable of those came, perhaps, in the regular season finale against Richmond.

The St. Bonaventure women’s basketball team had lost 16-straight games following an Atlantic 10-opening triumph over Loyola-Chicago. It was playing the first-place Spiders, a high-octane group that was averaging a conference-best 72 points per game on 47% shooting. And it was doing so without leading scorer Dani Haskell, who sat the final three games of the year with a right shoulder injury.

And still, the Bonnies were doing everything that Crowley had asked of them.

Bona limited Richmond to just 61 points on 42% shooting and Crowley “saw what our defense can be.” It trailed by just seven (26-19) at halftime. It had an offensive possession in the second half in which it grabbed three offensive rebounds and got four good looks, though none went in.

The misses sort of summed up Bona’s season; early in this rebuild, it simply didn’t have enough to hang with most of the opponents on its schedule. But what it did on this day, against a team of this caliber, signified true momentum.

“It said, 1. We’re still competing and playing really hard when things haven’t gone great, which is important to us,” said Crowley, who reprised his role as Bona’s women’s coach after guiding the program from 2000-2016, including its golden era run over the latter eight years. “And 2. We’re doing what we want to do, what we’ve worked on, we just … we have to find ways to get the payoff, and that’s the next step.”

ON PAPER, there was little payoff in Year No. 1 of Stint No. 2 under Crowley.

Bona went just 4-26, its lowest win total since joining the Division I ranks in 1986. It lost its final 18 games of the season, 10 of those by 15 points or more. Its last win came on Dec. 30, that joyous 84-72 decision over the Ramblers.

But there were also those little pieces of positivity.

Bona, on Feb. 21, took fourth-place George Mason to the wire before falling just short, 57-53. It hung with Richmond and fifth-place Duquesne. It showed flashes defensively, holding nine league foes to 65 points or fewer.

It battled. It cared, even as the season continued to get away from it. It laid the groundwork for recreating the culture that was in place from 2008-16, when Bona advanced to six postseasons, including two NCAA Tournaments. And that, more than wins and losses, was the most important box to check this winter.

“The obvious is (that it was) disappointing, right?” acknowledged Crowley of his team’s record. “It is what it is, so you can’t hide from that, you can’t pretend it’s not what it was. … But the other side of it is, I give our team tons of credit, they competed. It would have been really easy to be miserable at practice, to not show up at games, yet the last couple weeks of the season (we were right there).

“I do feel we started to understand competing, we started to understand the way we want to act in our program, on the floor, off the floor. Now we have to make that step to understand what more we need to do to get victories.”

TO BE sure, the struggles outweighed the successes.

Bona, after starting over last spring, had just 10 scholarship players for the season. It was oft-injured, with five players missing at least three games and one key holdover, Maddie Dziezgowski, appearing in just nine contests.

Haskell, the former Franklinville star, was never fully healthy after opening the year with a left shoulder injury and shut down for the final three contests of the season.

“She was playing with an injury all year,” Crowley said of Haskell. “And then in the Saint Louis game, she (hurts) her right shoulder. It just made no sense to risk that. And her left shoulder still really hadn’t healed, so she’s still in recovery right now. The goal now is, how can we get her fully healthy?”

Noting the additional challenge of introducing a new system to a mostly new team, he went on: “I thought (Dani) had a really solid year, but was still figuring out our offense, still figuring out her teammates and we were still figuring out her. I feel so much better about her now than I did a year ago because now I’ve coached her for a year. I know what she can do, where we can get her, how we can help her, how she can help us.”

Even in what he knew would be a full restart, Bona faced more adversity than Crowley expected.

AND YET, it coaxed some good from it. It created hope.

Crowley, the architect of those Sweet 16 and Round of 32 teams, came back when the program needed him most. Haskell returned home, where, despite those injuries, she was the Bonnies’ leading scorer at 12.3 points per game (and still has one final season of eligibility remaining). Payton Fields, a 6-foot guard, finished strong, averaging 11 points and four rebounds over the final seven games.

A once-proud fanbase slowly started to trickle back into the Reilly Center, a few hundred on hand for Richmond.

And Bona handled those struggles well under the circumstances.

“The adversity was tough,” admitted Crowley, who will return five players and already has six signed for next year. “But I was proud of how we handled it. I had made the decision: We’re gonna worry about building rather than instant gratification. And our kids bought into that and I thought we got better and better at what we wanted to be …

“The fact that we were able to do it without getting a lot of rewards for it, I think speaks to the character of a lot of our players too.”