First to emerge from a back corner of Reynolds Coliseum were the cheerleaders. Eight men sprinted while holding aloft red flags with one bold white letter on each that spelled out Wolfpack, and the women followed while wiggling their red-black-and-white pom poms.

When the team takes the court, the players sprint onto the hardwood in a single-file line. When they get to midcourt, half turn right and break to the other side of the floor, the rest continue on a straight line to the nearest corner. Once everyone is in their place, they begin the last of their pregame warm-ups. Just as they start a passing drill, one last player walks out onto Kay Yow Court.

Emili Tasler is dressed in her white home uniform and is wearing a red shooting shirt. She has on red-and-white high-tops — the right one with a pink shoelace, as has become custom for the Wolfpack as coach Kay Yow continues her fight against breast cancer — and her hair is pulled back into a tight ponytail.

She looks ready to play.

But look closer.

She’s walking because she cannot run.

The left knee, the one that crumpled 11 months earlier, the one that was supposed to be healed by now, is not.

The limp that was supposed to be gone, the explosion and confidence that were supposed to be back, are not.

The college career that was supposed to start on the same floor where her high school career was cut short has been delayed.

During preseason workouts, Tasler felt some discomfort in her surgically reconstructed left knee. It kept slipping any time she tried to cut and change direction.

She thought the muscles in her leg were still weak from the initial injury, so she focused on continuing to rebuild the strength and stability in her left knee.

But the pain persisted.

An MRI revealed the meniscus was still torn — she never had surgery to repair it since it was supposed to heal on its own — and the anterior cruciate ligament that had been reconstructed was partially torn, too.

The slipping sensation was the femur, or thigh bone, slipping over the tibia, or shin bone, precisely what the ACL is supposed to prevent.

She underwent ACL reconstruction surgery for the second time in 10 months, and her freshman season, from a playing standpoint, is awash.

“I was pretty bummed,” Tasler said. “It wasn’t really what I wanted to hear, but I’m going to take what I can from it. I’ll get to watch everybody and learn. I’m just taking the best of the opportunity.”

Her goal from the time she suffered the first injury, last Dec. 27 in a game during her senior season at Apex High, was to be 100 percent healed and ready for the first day of practice in October. If not by then, certainly she would be prepared for the Wolfpack’s Nov. 11 season opener against UNC-Greensboro at Reynolds Coliseum.

There was to be some poetic justice in returning for that game. It was at Reynolds last winter that Tasler drove the lane, weaved through traffic, rose for a running jumper, landed awkwardly and felt a pop. It seemed fitting that she would play the first game in the same place where she played her last. That’s still likely to happen, only it won’t take place until next year.

Instead of racing through the warm-up lines, instead of sitting on the bench waiting to enter the game, Tasler spends game nights resting on the hoop’s support as her team warms up and sitting in a chair 20 feet from the spot where this whole mess began.

But she doesn’t dwell on what she’s lost, perhaps because she hasn’t lost anything. She’s just had another setback.

“I know it’s hard for an athlete, a competitor, to just watch and not be out there,” Yow said. “But I think it’s also soothing to know you’re not going to lose that year. You’re still going to have four years [of eligibility]. And you never know how it might turn out for the best. So you just accept what you can’t change. And you just make it work for you.”

Tasler needs only to look a few seats down the bench in order to see the benefit of sitting out the season.

Megan Zullo, a 5-foot-8 redshirt freshman guard, was in a similar situation last year.

She appeared in the Wolfpack’s first seven games before a stress fracture in her right leg derailed what was proving to be a promising freshman year. Zullo sat out the final 27 games of State’s season and took a medical redshirt. She used that time to learn the intracacies of the college game, study State’s system and get into better shape.

“It really helped me to get to know the game better,” Zullo said of her year off. “Coming to the college level is totally different than high school. It’s a lot more physical. You have to be ready to go. Sitting out, after getting over being depressed, it actually helped me. I got to watch film and watch everybody else getting into the system.”

So far this season, she’s started each of the Wolfpack’s seven games, and she averages 25.4 minutes and 8.0 points per game.

There are more than 100,000 ACL injuries in the United States each year, according to the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons. While most patients make complete recoveries, roughly 8 percent experience a re-injury.

The prospect of enduring several more months of rehab, on top of the months-long work that was just completed, is a hardly welcoming one for Tasler. But she knows that’s what she must do in order to get back on the court again.

“It’s just one of those things I have to do,” she said. “I’m used to doing it, and I know it’s helping me, so ...”