Mike Cook was alone on the left wing of Pitt's methodical half-court offense, late in the first half, no closer to a dark-shirted Robert Morris defender than he was to Dick Groat.

And he was going to stay that way.

Levance Fields passed the pumpkin instead to Ronald Ramon in the left corner. Not a bad choice, but an interesting, even revealing, decision relative to where these Panthers are on the promise-paved road to wherever they're going.

Cook is a remarkably more elegant player than any of the more fire-tested components in Jamie Dixon's machine. The Panthers, you may have heard, whether they're No. 3 or No. 2 or even No. 1 in the little known perhaps because it's purely fictional Pitt Alumni poll, do not exactly generate the athletic spectacle you might associate with one of America's greatest college basketball teams.

The Pitt paw print on any reliable win -- as it was again last night against a determined and talented Robert Morris team -- is anything and everything but a series of opulent transition baskets and rim rattling theatrics.

Pitt comes to work you to death, and exactly where a fluid X-factor such as Cook fits into Pitt's blunt basketball personality still isn't terribly clear, particularly on a defense Dixon's team delivers with almost monastic resolve.

Twenty-four hours before Pitt's seventh consecutive season-opening win, Dixon described Cook's defense aptitudes as "not there yet, in our book."

But what is there looks like a load of talent and floor-savvy, the very thing Pitt can use on much colder nights, maybe when its no-frills style isn't matching up terribly well with another Big East bully.

So on a night when Mark Schmidt's visiting Colonials made it clear they weren't about to take their traditional 25-point Petersen Events Center beating and slink back toward the Parkway West, Cook did his expected part, slashing for pretty layups, passing near perfectly and taking the kind of confident shot that projects all that promise.

"We've got to come out every night focused," Cook said after another pretty unpretty 67-53 Panthers victory. "If we do that we should be a lot better by Big East time, and especially by tournament time."

There's no reason Pitt shouldn't have elaborate tournament plans, but Cook will only further legitimize them as he finishes this transition from East Carolina transfer to idle swing man to full-furred modern Panther.

"It's not hard, it's just taking me some time to adjust," said the junior from Philadelphia. "I just have to keep looking for chances to penetrate, to get in the lane the way I did against Florida State, and to find my teammates a lot."

He had nine assists and 15 points Friday in the blowout of FSU but had only three and 11 last night, sometimes looking lost, other times neglected.

But Cook was still Pitt's second-leading scorer despite taking only one shot from the field in the second half. With the Colonials making ominous runs early in the first half and again five minutes into the second, the 6-4 guard-forward from Philadelphia made some plays that gained Pitt some separation on an occasion when it would shoot 2 for 17 from 3-point range.

It was Cook's driving left-handed layup one possession after he'd hit both ends of a one-and-one that first pushed the lead to 10, 28-18, and it was his silken jumper that pushed the Pitt lead back to eight, 57-49, seven minutes after the Colonials had actually taken a one point lead at the 13-minute mark.

Robert Morris is due a ton of credit for its own work last night despite losing for the first time in five starts, the 4-1 mark representing the best start in the program's 31-year history. Though a one-point Colonials lead with seven minutes remaining against the No. 2 team in the country was hardly predictable, the end result was a familiar story. Pitt won with defense, specifically by holding senior Colonials stud A.J. Jackson to six points.

Jackson came into the game averaging 24 points, by far the most prodigious on either roster, and had scored at least 20 in each of RMU's first four starts. Last night, he shot 2 for 13 and 0 for 6 from 3-point range. In 36 minutes, he averaged a point every six.

Can Mike Cook lock himself into Pitt's maniacal defensive mind-set? That's an enormously pivotal issue. If he does, his teammates will trust him a little more at both ends, and the result might be combustible.

"Coach just tells me to keep getting better," Cook said. "I'm having trouble just keeping my [defensive] stance."

Is it foreign to him?

"Not foreign," he said. "That's just me being stubborn about it."

Oh.