Standing outside his team’s locker room after a season-ending 73-58 loss to Northwestern, the question was posed to Indiana’s young guard: What did you learn from this season?

“We can be a great rebounding team,” Hulls said. “We came together, we have lots to improve upon, but I feel like we got a lot better as the season went on.”

Down the stretch run last year, during that record-setting losing streak and through the mounting blowouts, it began to feel as though the Hoosiers had maxed out their potential for that season. Overmatched and undermanned every night, Indiana reached a point where players were physically and, perhaps, mentally worn down to such a degree that both the means and the end of each game became thoroughly predictable.

This season looked that way too, for awhile. After a strong December and January, marked by wins over the likes of Pittsburgh, Michigan and Minnesota, the Hoosiers disappeared, losing 11 in a row in mostly-forgettable fashion. Fans wanted to give up. Some of us in the media (me, mostly) wanted to let go. Even players, at times, appeared as if their hearts and heads just couldn’t align well enough to give another win-worthy effort.

The Senior Day win over Northwestern disproved that. And Thursday’s loss, deceptively large, sort of said the same.

I was in this building a year ago when, against a talented-but-not-unstoppable Penn State squad, No. 11-seed Indiana basically rolled over. The Hoosiers just looked too tired, too worn down, too short of confidence to mount a significant challenge against any Big Ten opponent.

What positives could one take from such regular, predictable, heavy losing? I don’t think it’s fair to say that this time around.

I’ll acknowledge that this team has serious problems. We could find most of them, you and I, if we took a trip down Thursday’s final stat sheet … so why don’t we?

Nineteen turnovers to 10 assists, that’s a familiar tune. Seventeen offensive rebounds allowed, although 14 were also collected. Northwestern ending the game on a 37-15 run should also be chucked into this conversation as well.

But these are mistakes that get ironed out with experience — correctable mistakes that, when they’ve played well and flashed future potential, we’ve seen the Hoosiers overcome.

Last season, there was an unspoken understanding that progress was going to, at a given point, grind to a halt from which it could not be retrieved. This season, if at times so slowly, Indiana still kept growing, and though it’s hard to see, it’s in that slight difference that measurable steps can be taken.

Players provided examples:

Christian Watford: “We get real tentative under pressure is one thing. And that happened today also. We had some key turnovers late that cost us the game. With time and with experience, that won’t happen.”

Derek Elston: “In the beginning, a lot of people could have said rebounding. But, you know, we took rebounding to the next level after that, so really, just everybody’s kind of got to work on their own, individually. That’s one thing that I think is the only thing I could really look at right now.”

Obviously, it doesn’t happen with words, and it certainly doesn’t happen in postgame locker rooms following conference tournament losses. But, more often than not, it happens.

Accuse me of being soft on Tom Crean, or soft on this team. Go ahead, I don’t care. Last weekend, I trekked up to Milwaukee for the Notre Dame-Marquette game, and I saw a team two years removed from Crean that still bore his wax seal — they played fast, moved the ball, cracked down on defense, and, as of the writing of this column, have taken a projected 13th-place finish in the Big East and won 22 games and a spot in the NCAA tournament. Buzz Williams obviously deserves plenty of credit, but so does the man who put his team together for him, and not just in recruiting.

I’ll be perfectly honest — I don’t know if Crean’s ceiling as a coach is high enough to return Indiana to where it wants to go, I really don’t. But I do know that two years, given the depth of the task Crean faces, is not enough time to celebrate or condemn his work. Progress has been made, if by no other measure than in wins. (Which also happen to be the simplest in this business.)

Nearly every college basketball season must end in defeat, it’s the natural order of things. And every end-of-season locker room often overflows with talk of next year, of belief, of meaningful, touchable, impactful improvement, and Indiana’s was no different.

But when Jordan Hulls had a chance to speak rhetorically, to spout off the same tired-but-indestructible lines every 10-win basketball team must cling to for survival, he talked about rebounding.

Call me crazy, but that’s progress.

The ghost of Hoosier future.

Derek Elston (10 points, nine boards) and Christian Watford (nine points, six boards) playing close to the  double-double men they’re capable of being night in and night out. Verdell Jones and Jordan Hulls handling the perimeter. A strong start. Controlled, sensible decisions. Being in the driver’s seat for 32 minutes of this one. Using the same scheme — a zone that forced outside shots — against Northwestern twice in the same week, and it working. Respectable shooting from the field (43.5 percent) and (sort of) from three (33.3 percent).

The ghost of Hoosier past.

The scoring droughts. A few of ‘em, but none more costly than the 9:29 without a field goal late in the second half — a stretch of time that essentially lost this team the game.

The turnovers. When the wheels fell of midway through the second half, Northwestern’s 1-3-1 zone forced the Hoosiers into plenty of them, and of course, there were a number of the unforced variety as well. In total, IU had 19. (13 of which came in the second half.)

—

This one stings a bit, because IU had this game. The car was on cruise control. But they fell asleep at the wheel and veered off the road — never to recover.

It would have been nice to rack up an 11th win, nice to have a chance at a 12th win against Purdue in the next round of the tourney. But alas, what’s doomed the Hoosiers all season — their inability to take care of the ball and put the ball in the basket — doomed them again today.

Going to cut this one short instead of rambling on like usual. We’ll have plenty of end-of-the-year content starting next week for y’all, which should be fun.

Thanks for sticking with us this season, and don’t fret. Better days are ahead.

Jones finished the regular season with averages of 14.8 ppg, 3.9 rpg and 3.3 apg.

Watford posted 12.1 ppg, 6.0 rpg and hit nearly 80 percent of his free throw attempts.

A couple of other notable award recipients:

+ Ohio State’s Evan Turner was named Player of the Year by both the media and coaches.

+ Purdue’s Matt Painter was the choice as Coach of the Year by his peers, while Ohio State’s Thad Matta got the nod from the media. No offense to Matta, but I’m not sure how anyone could not vote for Painter.

+ Illinois guard D.J. Richardson was Freshman of the Year on the coaches balloting, while Northwestern guard Drew Crawford took the honor from the media.

You can access the complete All-Big Ten teams here.

Tom Crean:

Christian Watford:

Daniel Moore:

Verdell Jones:

Jordan Hulls:

Fast forward the calendar five weeks and the rematch was the same old story.

Too much Will Buford, Dallas Lauderdale and Evan Turner. No offensive cohesion. And not nearly the defensive intensity needed to be competitive.

The result: A fifth straight loss for Indiana – 69-52 – dropping the Hoosiers to 9-14 overall and 3-8 in the Big Ten.

“It was pathetic in a lot of ways,” Tom Crean told Don Fisher on the postgame radio show. “It was pathetic defensively. It’s inexcusable, but I don’t have a lot of avenues to go right now in the sense of making different decisions. But we will and we’ll be able to correct it and fix it as we move along.”

Through the first 12-plus minutes, Indiana looked like it might make a game of it. With Turner on the bench with two fouls, the Hoosiers were within one at 18-17.

Ohio State responded with a 16-3 run the last 7:48 of the half to grab a 34-20 halftime lead. And the Hoosiers never got within 12 the rest of the way.

“The margin for error against teams like that are so poor for us, but we don’t have any chance when we don’t play harder than that,” Crean said.

Buford finished with a game-high 21 points, Lauderdale added 14 points and eight rebounds and Turner, the front runner for Big Ten Player of the Year, had 10 points, seven rebounds and six assists in 21 minutes.

It was the eighth straight Big Ten win for Ohio State, moving the Buckeyes into a tie for first place.

Indiana, which shot just 37 percent from the field, got 15 points and seven rebounds from Christian Watford and 13 points from Jordan Hulls.

+ Box score

On this night, it was the familiar blend of turnovers, poor shot selection and an overall lack of offensive rhythm that doomed Indiana in a 69-45 loss. The Hoosiers were just 1-of-15 from behind the arc, shot 36.5 percent from the floor for the game and committed 19 turnovers, leading to 21 Michigan points.

“We got a lot of good looks, but they just wouldn’t fall,” Verdell Jones said afterward, referring in particular to the 3-point shooting.

Indiana fans can take heart in the Hoosiers’ defensive effort, which the final score probably doesn’t do justice. The visitors forced 16 turnovers and never let Michigan find its 3-point shot, one of the Wolverines’ preferred scoring methods. And it wasn’t until late in the second half that Michigan truly pulled away — cued, unsurprisingly, by Manny Harris’ 17 second-half points, most of which came in the final minutes.

“Credit Indiana, they did a wonderful job,” Michigan coach John Beilein said after the game. “I was really impressed with how they played defense today.”

Christian Watford continued to prove a bright spot for Indiana, finishing with 16 points and eight rebounds. As a team, in fact, IU finished with a 32-28 advantage in points in the paint and pulled down 12 offensive rebounds.

But even in their statistical victories, there were flaws. Too often, Hoosier guards drove the baseline only to fall to traps and subsequent turnovers. And Indiana’s perimeter players struggled to get the ball inside to Watford and other big men on several occasions, forcing bad passes into double teams, leading to more giveaways.

“We’ve got to swing it and drive so that we can get the defense rotating and then try and throw it in there,” Jones said of Indiana’s attempts to feed the post. “I think we were doing one pass or no passes and trying to throw it in, and they were reading on it.”

Again, Indiana fell short of the kind of signature conference win its fans would like to see, but this performance was not so listless as the first road loss this season, a 79-54 loss at Ohio State. But the one-two punch of DeShawn Sims and Manny Harris — good for 41 points and 14 rebounds by night’s end — was too much for the Hoosiers.

“At the end of the day, two of the better players in the country — two of the very best players in this league — were too much for us to handle,” Indiana coach Tom Crean said. “When we’re not clicking on all cylinders defensively, we don’t have enough guys that can make plays individually to keep people from going where they want to go. And (Michigan) just did an excellent job with it.”

“We kind of came unglued at the end, after playing a very, very strong game for so long, and never letting ourselves get rattled. But we did get rattled at the end, and it was because of the abilities of Manny Harris and the abilities of DeShawn Sims.”

Do you know what we learned tonight? Because I’ll tell you what we learned tonight. This Hoosiers team is trending as such: good performances buttressed by bad ones. Really, really bad ones.

Where one could take pride in games like IU’s victory over Michigan, or Pittsburgh or even their work against Kentucky in a loss, they’ve underachieved in Puerto Rico, looked woeful at home in a loss to Loyola (Md.) and looked equally bad against Ohio State in Columbus this evening.

We wanted to look to the Michigan game as a sign this team has turned the corner, that they were going to be OK without Mo Creek. But they are young. Young teams will do that to you. They will emblazon your heart one moment with the promise of better things on the horizon, only to regress to a middle-school turnover fest the next.

If you watched the game this evening — IU’s first real road test of the season in a stadium that wasn’t even full and was pretty lifeless — you know what happened here. Turnovers were the story. Unforced, dribbled-off-the-leg turnovers. Fourteen in the first half, coupled with the length and athleticism of Ohio State’s man defense that left IU stagnant on the offensive end, and there was just no turning back. Christian Watford had six of those 14 turnovers in the first half. (IU finished with 24 for the game, by the way.) And where Devan Dumes came in and saved the day against Michigan last week, he instead air-balled a three upon his arrival.

Ohio State hit 5-of-10 threes and grabbed 12 points off all those turnovers in the first half, while IU ended it with their lowest point total of the season heading into the locker room (20).

Up 18 to start the second half, Ohio State got out in transition for a couple buckets early, and the lead eventually ballooned all the way to 32. Evan Turner was not needed this evening, that’s for sure.

IU just had no answers tonight. The road is always a tough journey in the Big Ten. Add in a young, inexperienced team to the mix, and it becomes that much harder.

THE GOOD: VJ3, FREE THROWS, TOMORROW IS ANOTHER DAY.

Can’t say enough about Verdell Jones. The kid brought it for 20 points against Michigan last week, and then topped it tonight, pouring in 22 points on 7-of-16 shooting, and 7-of-8 from the charity stripe. IU was an impressive 14-of-17 from the line for 82.4 percent tonight as well.

You hate to see IU play like this, because you know they’re capable of so much more. But this team has proven so far that its a wildly inconsistent performer. Until they string solid performances on top of each other and don’t go into a dark regression again, it’s hard to gauge which IU team is going to show up on any given night.

Jordan Hulls:

Christian Watford:

Devan Dumes:

But after a Christian Watford free throw tied the game at 54 with 8:49 remaining, the more experienced Terrapins went on a 16-4 run on their way to a comfortable 80-68 win in the Big-Ten ACC Challenge.

The loss was the fourth in five games for Indiana.

Greivis Vasquez scored 23 points to lead Maryland (5-2), which shot 47 percent from the field. Vasquez hit 13 of 14 free throws. Three other Terrapins scored in double figures, led by 19 from Landon Millbourne.

“It was a winnable game and we did not pressure the ball well enough,” Indiana head coach Tom Crean said. “We did not play physical enough, we did not play tough enough on the defensive end.”

The Hoosiers, on the other hand, shot just 33 percent and despite pulling down 20 offensive rebounds, scored just 16 second chance points. Maurice Creek scored 19 points to lead IU and Christian Watford added 16.

Indiana led by seven with 5:29 remaining in the first half on a pair of free throws by Creek, but Maryland closed the half on a 14-5 run to grab a 35-33 halftime lead.

The Terps took the lead for good at the 8:36 mark on a free throw by Adrian Bowie and IU’s final lead was 53-52 with 9:44 on a jump shot by Verdell Jones.

Besides Creek and Watford, Indiana struggled to find offense. Jones shot just 3-of-15 and Derek Elston and Devan Dumes each shot 2-of-10 from the floor. The Hoosiers hit just 7-of-26 three-point attempts.

Crean unhappy with student chants towards Vasquez: “We can be obnoxious, we can be nasty, we can cheer against the other team, but we never use vulgarity. We never use vulgarities against an opponent. That’s not what happened at Indiana in the past and it’s certainly not going to happen under my watch. But I love our fans. I love the energy they brought us tonight. We did not match the energy of our fans. But at no point in time are vulgarities in that crowd going to be accepted. And that cannot happy at Indiana. We have too much pride. We have too many great students, great memories, too many tradition based things here for anything to ever turn it the other way. And nobody deserves that. We’ve got to find a way to be obnoxious without being vulgar because we’re too good for that.”

Maryland turns it over: The Terrapins committed a season-high 18 turnovers. They came into the game averaging just 10.7 per game.

Jeremiah Rivers injury: After a reverse layup with 18:56 remaining in the first half, Rivers left the game with back spasms. He returned later in the first half and finished with five points, six rebounds, two assists, a block and a steal in 19 minutes.

Up next: Pittsburgh on Tuesday, Dec. 8 at Madison Square Garden at 9:00 EST. The game will be broadcast on ESPN.

Crean discusses fan behavior, courtesy of Ronan O’Shea on YouTube:

Player postgame interviews, courtesy of IU Athletics on YouTube:

Yes, Indiana lost, and ended up 0-3 in Puerto Rico. But the Hoosiers looked much better against George Mason this morning than they did against Ole Miss and Boston University.

Guys like Bobby Capobianco — seven points, 10 boards (five offensive) and Jordan Hulls — eight points — played the best games of their young careers. Bobby C. might not have a ton of polish, but he did the dirty work on the boards and finished around the rim. It’s exactly the kind of play Tom Crean is looking for from him off the bench. Hulls played with poise, and I think did a better job of orchestrating the offense today than Rivers had done in the previous two games in this tourney. Crean recognized that, and when both Hulls and Rivers were in the ball game, it was Hulls bringing the ball up.The box score only reads 13 minutes for Hulls, but he played so well when he was in there, it seemed like much more.

Hulls lacks athleticism and when you couple that with his size, it can create some matchup problems. But he’s solid, doesn’t make many mistakes and has great basketball IQ. And he flashed some range today with two threes. If the Hoosiers would have gotten a chance to get a three off to tie the game instead of Mason fouling so they had no chance to pop, Hulls was the guy I wanted shooting the ball.

IU seemed more under control, and their 15 turnovers came less off trying to do too much or getting out of control on the break, and more off some passing problems. On the offensive end, they looked more mature, looked more confident. But they just weren’t knocking down shots (20-of-57 for 35 percent shooting), and missed a lot of bunnies around the rim. It proved quite costly.

Perhaps most important in this loss was the way IU closed out the game. It wasn’t an implosion like we saw against Boston University. They didn’t wilt. They scored when they needed to. And with the game tied and Mason looking for a go-ahead bucket, IU played terrific defense and forced Cam Long into a desperation three with the shot clock winding down and a few Hoosier hands in his face. He just happened to hit that desperation three. On a bank shot. A bank he most certainly didn’t call. Tough way to lose, especially for a young team looking for confidence.

The Hoosiers also hit 21-of-28 from the line, good for 75 percent. Lets hope those early free-throw woes are a thing of the past.

THE BAD AND UGLY: DEFENSE.

For as improved as the Hoosiers looked with the ball in their hands this morning, their defense was atrocious. It seemed no matter what they tried — man or zone — Mason just dunked all over them. They were able to get behind Indiana’s zone for high-percentage shots, and they got a lot of alley-oops off penetration. There’s a reason Mike Morrison shot 64 percent from the field this morning: all he did was dunk.

George Mason scored 42 of their 69 points in the paint.

Tom Pritchard got into foul trouble early. And in 14 minutes, he had two rebounds, an assist and no points. This sort of production is starting to become a trend for him. You wonder if someone else steps up — perhaps Bobby C. with his play today, or Tijan or Bawa — they might be inserted into the starting lineup. That’s a bit of a scary prospect, but Crean might have no other choice soon.

Christian Watford also had a rough go of it in Puerto Rico. He looked like he’d be the runaway Pick to Click winner every game after Howard and USC Upstate, but this morning he was only 3-of-13 from the field, and he shot  25.8 percent on 8-of-31 shooting in Puerto Rico. He seemed a bit overwhelmed by the athleticism of Ole Miss, and his lack of strength is sometimes an issue.

But he’s a freshman. You’d expect the shot to come back at some point soon here.