The "ah-ha" moment

You are allowed to say it this morning, given the way the sky has supposedly been falling in big chunks on the unprotected heads of Archie Miller and his lads. So let's just get it out of the way, shall we?

Indiana 66, No. 11 Ohio State 54.

All together now: Wait ... what?

You mean Indiana, the gang that still can't shoot straight, manhandled a team that's made its bones this season manhandling almost everyone else?

You mean Indiana, which is 13-3 but has looked so bad in the "3" that it can't even get ranked, finally played like it was 13-3?

You mean Indiana -- which is 13-3, but which its perpetually disgruntled fan base is so unhappy with the birth of firearchiemiller.com seems imminent -- beat the life out of a team that was ranked No. 1 not all that long ago?

Wait ... what??

Only the next game will tell us if this was Indiana's "ah-ha" moment down there in Assembly Hall yesterday, but if there's such a thing as MapQuest directions for making 13-3 actually look like 13-3, yesterday was it. And those directions were brutally simple.

In short: Just play defense.

Defend the rim like the RAF defended Britain during the Blitz. When an opposing player shoots, act as though he just said "Your mother wears army boots." Stop the dribble. Attack the attacker. Ugly the thing up.

Do that, and there will be more days like Saturday. Don't do it, and ... there won't.

This is because Indiana saw the truth yesterday, and the truth is that this is not a team that's ever going to win on style points. That's because it still can't hit a bovine in the hindparts with a bass fiddle on the offensive end. So its only recourse is to turn every game into a knife fight in a closet.

Baryshnikov these Hoosiers ain't. Balboa they is.

Consider, for instance, that Indiana somehow won this deal despite failing to make a field goal for the last 10 minutes of the first half, and for five-and-a-half minutes in the second half. The Hoosiers missed 14 shots in a row to end the first half. They missed 29 of their 49 shots total. And they still won because they made Ohio State play even uglier than they did.

The Buckeyes were challenged, bodied and harassed into 32.7 percent shooting. They turned it over 14 times against just eight assists. They attempted 26 shots from beyond the arc and made just nine.

And, yes, to be sure, maybe a little of  this was just the Big Ten's loopy zeitgeist manifesting itself again. League play so far has been, to put it mildly, insane. The Buckeyes, a top-five team for most of this season, are now 1-4 in league play. Ranked teams lose to unranked teams, who then become ranked and lose as well.

 It's a madness that's afflicted much of the college basketball landscape this season; on Saturday, for instance, Baylor went into Allen Fieldhouse and knocked off the latest No. 1 (Kansas), and North Carolina drooped to 8-8 on the season after losing at home to Clemson for the first time in 59 meetings.

Last time it happened? 1926.

In any event, someone else will be No. 1 this week, and therefore ripe for the plucking. Indiana might actually be ranked, finally. And this week, they're at Rutgers and at Nebraska.

Maybe they'll win. Maybe they'll forget yesterday's "ah-ha" moment and lose again.

Stay tuned. Seems it's the only way to keep up these days.