KNOXVILLE — I spent much of last basketball season trying to figure out what was wrong with Chris Lofton.

Today, I finally learned the answer.

And I’m stunned.

The University of Tennessee’s star senior guard played last season while undergoing treatment for testicular cancer, which was discovered during a drug test from last season’s NCAA tournament.

I don’t know exactly what to write, but I’ll start here: I was wrong — not in my writing from last season, but the thoughts in my head.

I probably wasn’t the only UT beat writer who heard rumors that Lofton had failed a drug test. But in an era where too many self-dubbed “new media” outlets will throw any wild rumor against a wall to see if it sticks, me and this newspaper don’t play by those rules.

The rumors came my way shortly after I took the UT beat last August. Honestly, I didn’t believe them, because that didn’t seem to match any description I’d ever heard about Lofton — but then again, does anything really surprise anyone these days?

Lofton played poorly at the USA Basketball Pan-American Games team tryouts last August. Then he started the season noticeably smaller, slower and awkward. It wasn’t just that his perimeter shots weren’t falling — that can happen to anyone, even Lofton. He just looked like a completely different player. His inability to drive into the paint and score all but disappeared some nights, and sometimes he’d stumble and lose the ball before taking a shot. I became more and more confused. What happened to the player who once made nine 3-pointers in a game? What happened to the player who tormented teams like Memphis, Florida and Texas — hitting a ridiculous 3 in the closing seconds over phenom Kevin Durant to defeat the Longhorns?

What happened to the guy who pulled up and made a shot from the point of the star in Vanderbilt’s Memorial Gymnasium?

I made countless inquiries about Lofton’s struggles. I asked him, his coaches, his family, opposing coaches and just about anyone else who might have an idea why such a hard-working player would take such a large step back as a senior. It just didn’t add up. He was never the most physically gifted player, but that had never kept him from anything except in-state scholarship offers. I knew it wasn’t laziness. Considering all the big shots he’d made since high school, I figured it wasn’t a confidence issue, either.

But what was it? I had convinced myself of three possible, logical explanations (at least they seemed logical):

1) His injured ankle from last season was still bothering him, and he didn’t want to make excuses.

2) He had a hard time learning how to mesh with talented transfer Tyler Smith in UT’s offense.

3) Maybe, just maybe, he had failed that drug test and wasn’t the same player without artificial assistance. Sports have made all of us skeptical, and often times with good reason.

But, again, I turned out to be astonishingly wrong. I’m really glad that speculation never transferred from my brain to my fingers to readers’ eyes.

It turns out Lofton had testicular cancer and Herculean heart. He didn’t want to redshirt and miss the best potential season in the history of a program he helped resurrect, and he didn’t want his issues to distract teammates.

Yes, Lofton lied to the media. Yes, he told just one of his teammates — close friend and fellow senior guard Jordan Howell — the real reason for his struggles. But I will not sit here and put blame on him. He told his coaches, and they thought keeping him on the floor was the right decision.

I was consistently amazed that Lofton never made one excuse for his lackluster play. Day after day, whether it was just us handful of beat guys or dozens of national media, he simply sat there and told us he wasn’t playing up to his standards.

“Seriously, Chris, is something else going on?” I asked him one day.

“Seriously, no,” he said with a smile. “They’re just not going in ... but they’ll start going in soon. I always think they’re going in. Every one of them.”

I respected him then, and now I respect him even more.

When you’ve been through what Lofton went through, it probably wasn’t that hard to take our questions and criticisms. Maybe that’s why he laughed at us.