Who are these guys?

 Come on, admit it. You thought this ended against Michigan.

Down 13 at halftime, down 17 with 11 minutes to play, the Hoosiers were about to go slaloming off the NCAA Tournament bubble. Toast, they were, as Yoda would say. Taking the early checkout, they were.

Except two days later, they're still in the hotel room, watching free HBO and ordering room service.

In other words, it's been an astounding two days for these Hoosiers, who flub-dubbed their way through February, losing five straight at one point and seven of their last nine games. But weird stuff happens in March.

Flub-dubs become basketball teams. Pinocchios become real. Michigans and Illinoises fall down and go boom.

First Michigan suddenly couldn't buy a bucket with cash money, and Indiana shoveled that 17-point pile down to nothing. And Indiana won, 74-69, outscoring the Wolverines 31-9 in the last 11 minutes, holding them to just two field goals in that span. harassing them into 10 turnovers in the second half.

Trayce Jackson-Davis, Indiana's nominal star, played like one, scoring 19 of his 24 points in the second half to go with eight rebounds and four blocked shots. Point guard Xavier Johnson played under control and in control, finishing with 17 points, seven assists and eight boards.

And yesterday?

Well, it was a 9 (Indiana) vs. a 1 (Illinois) seed, and, holy crap, the 9 seed won, 65-63. Jackson-Davis was superb again, going for 21 points and seven rebounds against Illini star Kofi Cockburn, who had 23 and 10. Johnson added 13 points, four boards and six assists. Race Thompson had 10 points, nine boards and a three-pack of 3s. And the defense shone again, limiting Illinois to 35.7 percent shooting/

And so now the Hoosiers are into the semifinals against Iowa, and again the talk around them is that they have finally Turned The Corner and Absorbed The Mike Woodson Way, and so on and so forth. We've heard all this before, of course. The wise course, then, is to say "Let's see what happens today."

Maybe Jackson-Davis continues to play as if Woodson is holding his parents hostage. Maybe Good Xavier doesn't revert to Bad Xavier. Maybe the defense -- the one part of Indiana's game that has been consistently and demonstrably better from the day Woodson arrived -- continues to smother people.

Or, maybe not. We've seen it before from these Hoosiers, after all.

Thing is, thanks to the last two days, we're gonna see them do one or the other again next week in the NCAA Tournament. We haven't seen Indiana there in six years. And we've seen them win 20 games only one other time in that same span.

All of which means Woodson at least the needle tracking in the right direction again, as Indiana hoped when it hired him.

"I don't know," a disgruntled Hoosiers fan (is there any other kind?) said to me back when IU was flub-dubbing it. "I think the jury's still out on Woodson."

"Maybe," I replied. "But remember, it's gonna take Woodson awhile to get all the Archie Miller out of their systems. And even if it may not look like it all the time, I think he's well on his way to doing that."

What do ya know. I might actually be right about that.

Speaking of weird March stuff.