Indiana Hoosiers Provided Satisfying End to a Special Season

Any other region, any other team or any other floor, and the Indiana Hoosiers would have been looking forward to an Elite Eight matchup. Instead, Indiana ran into the best team in the country on a night when it played like the best team in the country, simple as that.

The result was a 102-90 loss, sending the Hoosiers home after a season that not even the most optimistic fans could expect.

If you want to nitpick, you can nitpick.

Cody Zeller got into foul trouble early, but only after forcing Kentucky’s phenom Anthony Davis to the bench even more prematurely.

Jordan Hulls didn’t have his best game of the year defensively, but who’s going to argue with his nine assists without a single turnover?

Victor Oladipo was fantastic offensively, scoring 15 points on 6-of-8 shooting. But he couldn’t keep himself on the court long enough to help the Hoosiers where they need him most, on the defensive end.

And then there’s Christian Watford.

Okay, there’s absolutely nothing negative you can say about Watford’s play Friday. He was the only reason Indiana was able to stay in the game early. When the Hoosiers were spread thin in the first half due to foul trouble, Christian scored 17 of his career-high 27 points in the final 10 minutes of the first half.

Good luck pointing to a single player on the Hoosier roster that you can put this loss on; you can’t. Indiana played one of its best games of the season Friday night and still lost by double digits. That’s how good this Wildcat team is.

With three top-10 picks and potentially five first-round picks in the upcoming draft, Kentucky is the most talented college basketball team to take the floor since the 2004-05 North Carolina Tar Heels. If the Wildcats continue to play like they did Friday night, or anything even close to it, there isn’t a single team in the country that will stop them from bringing home their eighth national championship.

The Hoosiers shot 52.5 percent from the field in the loss; no other team Kentucky has played this season had been able to eclipse the 50 percent mark. And the 90 points that Indiana put up was easily the highest point total scored against the Wildcats’ vaunted defense, with Vanderbilt’s 74 being the next closest.

On top of that, Kentucky, a team that shoots 73.1 percent from the free-throw line on the season, was a ridiculous 35-for-37 on Friday night (94.6 percent). If the Wildcats shoot at their normal rate, you are talking about a two-to-three-point game down the stretch.

None of that matters to the Indiana players; they expected to win this game. They have no reason to be satisfied, but that doesn’t mean fans shouldn’t be.

The 2011-12 season will long be considered an important one in the scope of Indiana basketball history. It was full of a number of special moments, and though it ended in disappointment, it will always be remembered as the year when the Hoosiers rejoined the ranks of the college basketball blue-bloods.

It will be an anxious seven months for fans as they await another season. With the entire core expected to return, along with #theMovement coming in, the Hoosiers won’t have the luxury of flying under the radar.

They will be a top-5 ranked team in next year’s preseason polls, which means playing with an entirely different kind of pressure, the pressure that comes with national championship level expectations.

Something tells me they’ve been adequately prepared to handle it.

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