Now, can Hawkeyes bounce even higher in Nebraska?

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - And the team riding all the momentum into the hyped-for-a-year, sponsored-by-a-supermarket-chain, first-meeting-as-Big-Ten-football-brothers is ... Iowa?

Really? Really? Really.

But don't get too carried away in Hawkeyeland or too despondent in Huskerville. It's another week, a bounce up in the air on the Big Ten trampoline for one team, a rough spill off the apparatus for another. The only constant is that there is no constant.

Iowa fans need Dramamine for the down-up, down-up routine from their team this autumn. The Hawkeyes win, they lose. They look like toast one week, are flush with life the next. Then the process repeats itself.

Saturday at Purdue, where good tickets were available outside Ross-Ade Stadium by the fistful, the Hawkeyes saved their season with a 31-21 win over the Boilermakers a week after a 37-21 home loss to Michigan State. Sort of.

Just like they sort of saved their season when the beat Northwestern the week after looking like slugs at Penn State. Just like they sort of saved their season when they proclaimed themselves alive and well with a win over Michigan the week after the unspeakable horror of losing at lowly Minnesota.

The most consistent thing about this year's Hawkeyes has been their inconsistency.

But wait, Iowa did something Saturday that it hadn't achieved in 2011 or in its last two tries of 2010. It won a road game. Like good teams do.

“It's a monkey off our back,” Hawkeye receiver-extraordinaire Marvin McNutt said.

“It's definitely great,” said Iowa defensive tackle Mike Daniels.

It wasn't just the losing on the road that gnawed at the Hawkeyes in that string of five straight defeats on opponents' turf. It was some of the teams that beat them. Starting with Minnesota, twice.

Purdue isn't anything special, but at 5-5 it was playing for bowl-eligibility. Not that such a carrot on a string fooled the locals into thinking the Boilermakers had leapt toward competence, even with the previous week's home win over Ohio State. An announced crowd of just 40,106 on a bleak day made this the least-appealing setting for football that an Iowa team has encountered in quite a while.

But this road win could have come on a playground in nearby Romney, Ind., and the Hawkeyes would have gladly taken it.

“This was great,” Iowa quarterback James Vandenberg said. “This was something we had to do.”

He wasn't exaggerating. Lose this, and the Hawkeyes would have been in danger of having a second-consecutive poisonous November that could have ended with a 6-6 record and, say, a game against SMU in something played in Dallas called the TicketCity Bowl.

That isn't how you stir donors' souls on next spring's I-Club banquet circuit.

But now, it's a 7-4 Iowa squad going to Lincoln to face a Nebraska team that succumbed to the brutal schedule the Big Ten gave it in Year One. A week after squeezing out a win at Penn State, the Cornhuskers had to turn right around and travel to Michigan. Denard Robinson and his crew mauled Big Red, 45-17, rushing for 238 yards in the process.

What do you know, the Huskers aren't the bullies of the Big Ten right out of the box.

So Friday morning in Lincoln, there is no Big Ten title-game berth on the line, and there may not even be much bowl-jockeying at stake. This is simply for bragging rights in the new, bigger-than-life rivalry. Or, the way the rest of the nation will see it, it's for a win in the final game of the regular-season.

At least the Hawkeyes can go to imposing Memorial Stadium knowing how it feels to win away from its Kinnick Stadium happy place.

“It's good for our players to experience that,” Iowa Coach Kirk Ferentz said.

“That was our intention as of (last) Monday, Tuesday, when we got together. That was our thought-process.”

Now there's no threat of tumbling to 6-6 and a bowl that is unfamiliar to virtually everyone, including most people in the city in which it is played.

“We'll celebrate the win here,” said Iowa defensive end Broderick Binns, who was terrific again Saturday. “Once we get back (home) we'll talk about Nebraska. We know it will be a dogfight.”

Is there any way for the Hawkeyes to hang in the air for another week from this latest trampoline bounce? In this conference this year, anything's possible. And everything's challenging.