Hlas: Glory, lore within reach of Hawkeyes, Panthers

SEATTLE - The best way to describe Sunday night's opportunities for Iowa and Northern Iowa: Golden.

The Hawkeyes and Panthers can leave favorable, indelible impressions on the nation and their own legacies at KeyArena. The challenges are great in their Round-of-32 NCAA men's basketball tournament games Sunday, but the payoffs would long be remembered.

Gonzaga and Louisville are college basketball blue bloods. If Iowa beats the Zags and/or UNI overcomes the Cardinals, it's on to a Sweet 16 and it's something to cling to for a long, long time.

Saturday, UNI Coach Ben Jacobson was getting questions from non-Iowa media about the Panthers' victory over Kansas that sent them to the Sweet 16 in 2010. It's five years in the past. It will be recalled five years from now, five years after that, and longer.

'That gets talked about every year,” Jacobson said. 'And it gets talked about a lot in our community and on our campus, and it should, and I'm glad it does. That was, and is, a terrific moment for our program, and it raised the bar a little bit higher.”

Where just winning an opening-round NCAA game would have been grounds for a big Panthers party in the past, UNI's 71-54 victory over Wyoming here Friday felt more like a necessary step toward chasing something bigger.

That something is Louisville, the national-champs just two years ago and one of America's premier programs.

Beat the Cardinals, then the Panthers return to the Sweet 16 and see if they can travel even deeper into the tournament this time around.

Iowa has the same opportunity. The Hawkeyes don't have as high a national profile as UNI right now. The Panthers made NCAA lore a lot more recently than Iowa. They also are ranked No. 9 in the latest coaches' poll. That's the good kind of recognition.

But if the Hawkeyes can upset Gonzaga, their world and their image instantly change.

Gonzaga (33-2) often gets condescension from fans of the major conferences. The Zags have won 81 percent of their games in Mark Few's 16-year tenure as coach, which is ridiculously consistent and good. But since they haven't reached a Final Four, some still view them as having an illegitimate claim to being an elite program.

Well, I witnessed the last 10 minutes of their 86-76 win over North Dakota State here Friday night. That was enough to tell. The Zags have the look. They're special. A Final Four contender.

That isn't to say they'll make it past Iowa. It is to say they're very good.

'I think everybody knows that Gonzaga is a Top Ten program,” said Iowa Coach Fran McCaffery. 'They have been that for some time now.

'They step out of their conference and schedule pretty difficult teams regularly and are able to win on the road and win in tournament situations with really good teams. So, I think the days of anyone even remotely trying to refer to them as a mid-major program is somebody that's clearly not turned into the college basketball world.”

Iowa assistant coach Kirk Speraw said 'They operate like a high-major program. They've found their niche, and they're able to recruit very, very well. They have a national profile that allows them to recruit nationally.”

This chance is exactly what you want if you're Iowa and Northern Iowa. You've got your opening-round NCAA win. The hollow feeling of already being back home before the tourney's next round of games got started is someone else's, not yours.

When Northern Iowa's Paul Jesperson transferred out of Virginia two years ago, he said he chose between UNI and USC for his next school. His brother, David, plays basketball for Pepperdine in Malibu, so USC was attractive to him. But ...

'I felt like I had a better chance to get to the tournament and make some noise in the tournament with UNI,” Jesperson said Saturday.

Now, the possibility of toppling a brand-name and grabbing a big chunk of postseason glory is here for the Panthers and the Hawkeyes, and under the same roof.

A golden opportunity, indeed.

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