Thirty minutes after Wisconsin was halted by a Nebraska team that hadn't beat a winning squad since January, Nigel Hayes sat in the Badgers' locker room, counting up the loose-ball battles in his head.
His tally of the Huskers' snags? Too many.
"You play harder than the other team," the junior forward started, "you can get a lot of things done."
That night, the Thursday of the Big Ten tournament, Wisconsin was the victim of a scrappy underdog taking advantage of a favorite caught off guard. Nebraska played harder. The upset proved two things: first, that the Badgers had charged all the way back, from hunter to hunted; and second, that their attitudes had caught up with that scale change.
Now, as the seventh-seeded Badgers face 10 seed Pittsburgh in the first round of the NCAA tournament on Friday in St. Louis, they are determined to again harness the drive that took them from written off to red-hot
"I think we got a little complacent mentally," junior Vitto Brown said. "Not to say that we underestimated them, but I think we did have that sense of we're the top dogs now."
The sentiment is understandable. Heading into the league tournament, the Badgers had won 11 of 13. But before that, it was a season in Madison unlike any other in recent memory. After losses to Western Illinois, Milwaukee and Marquette in the nonconference season, nationally lauded coach Bo Ryan retired abruptly, handing longtime assistant Greg Gard the reins.
Outside of Kohl Center, the sense was that Gard was handed a live bomb, a theory further substantiated when Wisconsin dropped four of five to start league play.
"It was definitely a weird feeling," Vitto said. "We were really struggling to kind of figure out who we were at the time. It was like, 'Why is this happening?' "
Since then? The Badgers, invigorated by the reinstatement of Ryan's old swing offense, have lost just three games, including the flop against the Huskers. Wisconsin will be the favorite again Friday, but the underdog feeling is one the Badgers will try to adapt again.
"I told the team, 'You've got one more,' " Gard said. " 'You can put the jersey on one more time.' And obviously, we've got to get back to what put us in this position."
