Hlas: Super Nova, Hawkeyes flameout

NEW YORK — Many claim it's better to get blown out than have your heart broken by one questionable officiating call, one missed free throw, one fluky shot by an opponent that he'd miss 99 times out of 100.

They couldn't be more wrong.

Iowa's second-round NCAA tournament 87-68 loss to Villanova Sunday at Barclays Center made the Hawkeyes look as far from the Final Four as the Brooklyn Bridge is from Brooklyn, Iowa.

Better to lose a heartbreaker and go through life wondering what might have been. There was no wondering here. Villanova is a Sweet 16 team, a legitimate Final Four contender. Iowa is a Round of 32 team, and no more.

'It's frustrating,' Iowa's Jarrod Uthoff said after the game. 'We had the talent to win the Big Ten championship.'

You can appreciate the self-belief, but Uthoff is incorrect. Indiana had the talent to win the Big Ten championship. Indiana beat Iowa twice, beat Kentucky Saturday, and still is playing.

For one more strained New York metaphor, Villanova went through the Hawkeyes as if they were subway turnstiles. This game was over before it was 15 minutes old.

The parallel with last season's ending is eerie. Iowa went 12-6 in the Big Ten, which is good, though this year's 12-6 didn't feel nearly as good as last year's. It flamed out in the first round of the Big Ten tourney to a double-digit seed, which is bad.

It won an NCAA first-round game, which is good. It got taken apart in the second-round, having fallen way behind in the first half against Gonzaga last year and losing by that very same score of 87-68. Which is bad.

Iowa could have avoided facing a foe of this caliber this soon in the tourney had it not dropped six of its last eight games before getting here, but it didn't.

Besides, it wouldn't have dropped six of its last eight games if it were Villanova, which has lost just five times in 36 games.

So breaking down what happened Sunday isn't necessary. Jay Wright's Wildcats played like a team with 93 wins over the last three seasons. Determined, sharp, extremely talented.

The Hawkeyes, on the other hand, played like a team running on fumes that took advantage of a fortunate twist of fate at the end of their first-round game against Temple just to have proceeded to this game.

With that, let's dispense with anything more that could be perceived as criticism when it comes to the four senior players who helped transform their program from an afterthought to one that won two-thirds of their conference games over the last two years.

The NCAA tourney was a train in the distance for Iowa until Anthony Clemmons, Mike Gesell, Jarrod Uthoff and Adam Woodbury climbed aboard.

'They came here at a time when they knew it was going to fall on their shoulders,' Iowa Coach Fran McCaffery said, 'and not everybody's willing to do that.'

After almost every reporter had cleared out of Iowa's locker room following the game, Gesell and Uthoff planted folding chairs near Woodbury's cubicle, forming a triangle of dejection.

'It's over. Crazy.' Woodbury softly said to Uthoff, who silently nodded in agreement.

Those seniors are four men who played hard, played well, and left the program better than they found it.

Maybe the way we should look at this was through the eyes of 12-year-old Max Bonnstetter, who reported here for Sports Illustrated for Kids. Max asked Gesell the following when Gesell and Nicholas Baer were on the podium in the interview room.

'Congratulations on an outstanding career at Iowa and a great season,' Max said. 'What was the most fun about being a senior on the Iowa basketball team?'

Gesell thanked Max for the question before saying 'We had 17 guys that really came together this year, and it made all the success that we had throughout the season that much more fun when you're playing alongside guys that you feel like they're your brothers.

'So it was a blast, and it's a season that I'll never forget.'

It was a season that had a lot of good stuff. Some of it truly was a blast. The ending was not. Woodbury wasn't eloquent when asked how it feels, but he couldn't have been more honest.

'It sucks.'