Fran McCaffery has a 9-game win streak in conference tourney games. Getting to 10 will be tough.

The universe of Iowa men's basketball won't be changed by a victory in Thursday's first round of the Big Ten tournament.

Look, the Hawkeyes aren't going to win four games and four days and be the greatest Cinderella story since, uh, Cinderella. (That marks the first time in my sportswriting career I've used the "Cinderella" cliche, by the way. Sometime in the future I will break out "A tale of two halves" and  "What a difference a year makes." Then I'll laugh maniacally as I taunt Batman.)

But it would be a forward step for the Hawkeyes if they could topple someone in the first round at Indy Thursday, get a little taste of success at the Big Tens, and store it for future reference.

I suggest that would have been more possible had Minnesota done the right thing and defeated Penn State in Minneapolis on Sunday. A loss would have given the Nittany Lions the No. 7 seed, and given 10th-seed Iowa a more-manageable foe than the one it got because of the Gophers' blunder.

That would be Michigan State.

Now, this season's Spartans aren't like any Spartans in quite a while. They're mediocre. They were 9-9 in the Big Ten, and need two wins to avoid being the first MSU team in seven years to fail to win 20 games.

They have pieces that don't quite fit. That's a nice way of saying they are the wrong pieces. The Spartans may not be any better than Penn State. But they're the Spartans, this is March, and you don't want to play a Tom Izzo team in March. Any March. Northern Iowa found that out last year in the Sweet 16. Many teams have found that out in the NCAAs over the years.

One of the many rocks Fran McCaffery needs to break at Iowa, to use an old Hawkeye football shtick, is winning in Indy. The Hawkeyes haven't done that since they swept three games to win the Big Ten tourney in 2006.

2007: (Quarterfinal) Purdue 74, Iowa 55

2008: (First round) Michigan 55, Iowa 47

2009: (First round) Michigan 73, Iowa 45

2010: (First round) Michigan 59, Iowa 52

This tournament doesn't really even start until Friday. Thursday is for the six sad souls who couldn't lock up byes to Friday. Thursday is a half-empty arena, weekday afternoon games that matter little to America, and the sorting out of some riff-raff just for some Big Ten Network programming and some extra dollars in the Indianapolis economy.

Iowa didn't make it to Friday the last three years.

"You pack your bags for four days and in your mind you're ready for four," Iowa junior Matt Gatens said last Saturday. "But then you turn around and come back the same day."

Gatens was a fan in Indianapolis in '06 when Iowa went win-win-win. That has been Iowa's history in the tournament. It either goes deep, or it goes home.

Ten years ago, Iowa went 4-0 in four days to go from a seemingly NIT-bound No. 6 seed in the conference to the NCAAs in Long Island. The following year, Iowa got three-fourths of the trick done as the No. 9 seed with Luke Recker going wild, but reality caught up to it on Sunday in getting drubbed by top-seeded Ohio State.

The Hawkeyes had first-game flameouts in '03 and '04, but won twice in '05 before running the table in '06.

There will be no deep run this year, folks. Michigan State is on everyone's NCAA bubble. If MSU loses to 11-19 Iowa? It goes from bubble to buh-bye.

It's hard (not impossible, though) to see the Spartans losing this game against Iowa, even though they split the season-series (Iowa 72-52 in Iowa City, MSU 85-66 in East Lansing). But let's say Iowa pulls the upset. It gets Purdue in Friday's quarterfinals. What if it's late Friday night and Iowa has just beaten the Boilermakers for the second time within a week?

Let's just say the hype in Iowa for the future of Hawkeye basketball will be louder than it's been since, why, since Iowa won the Big Ten tourney in Chicago in 2001.

McCaffery has a nine-game winning streak in conference tournaments. His last three Siena teams went 3-0 in winning the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference title. If McCaffery can run his streak to 10 on Thursday against Michigan State, Hawkeye folks will be plenty content with how this season closed out no matter how ugly a Friday rematch with Purdue might get.