Moral something

 You can haul the what-ifs out of storage, because the guys in cream-and-crimson found a home for them yesterday. There's your positive in the wake of No. 2 Kansas 75, Your Indiana Hoosiers 71.

Your positive is closing your eyes and seeing Trey Galloway's final three with 20  seconds showing skim the iron unblessed, over and over. It's seeing Kel'el Ware just ... barely ... missing corralling a a crucial loose ball as it crossed the end line. It's an eight-point lead at halftime, a 13-point lead with 15 minutes to play, a lead still with four-and-a-half to play.

What if Galloway's three had bedded down? What if Ware's a micro-second quicker on that loose ball? What if Indiana doesn't run out of gas down the stretch and that lead doesn't dissolve into No. 2 Kansas 75, Your Indiana Hoosiers 71.

Altogether now, Hoosier Nation, which showed up in force to turn Assembly Hall into Assembly Hell for the visitors from the plains: Dammit. Dammit!

And, yeah, let the geezer brigade grumble and snarl that Mike Woodson's raised a team without a killer instinct, that by God ol' Bobby's Hoosiers knew how to close the deal when it had a team on the ropes. Let 'em shake their heads and mourn that back in the day no one would take an ounce of hope from a loss, for God's sake.

I get that sentiment, being a geezer myself. But if you were waiting to see if this team was as cold in the belly and around the heart as it's looked so far this season, you at least got an answer to that question yesterday.

That answer was (Bleep) no. You want fire in the belly and a show of heart? Here it is, (bleepers).

This is a team, remember, that got crushed by both of the top-shelf fives it had played prior to Saturday. UConn beat it by 20. Auburn destroyed it by 28 a week ago. It was a team whose guards couldn't guard at one end and couldn't throw it in the ocean from a cruise ship at the other. It was a team with two reliable inside players and not a lot else, a team that flat-out quit in that debacle a week ago.

Well. Yesterday, that team outhustled, outrebounded and out-fought Kansas. It outrebounded the Jayhawks 33-31. Galloway, Reneau and McKenzie Mgbako were 6-of-12 from the 3-point arc. And a week after Auburn braziered IU's perimeter D with 14 threes, Kansas managed to make just 6-of-18 tries. A 52.4 percent shooting team overall coming in, the Jayhawks shot ten percentage points below that (26-of-61) as the Hoosiers got up in their grills more often than not.

It wasn't enough, unfortunately. In the end 14 turnovers and 33 percent shooting in the second half undid all the good work. But at least for once there was an abundance of good work to be undone.

Moral victories are just losses dressed up in their Sunday best. But this was at least a moral something.

And that was something. Right?