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At the end of another long, tough night of Pac-12 basketball in the Huntsman Center, Utah coach Larry Krystkowiak brought his 8-year-old twin daughters to the interview room Sunday, introducing them as "our defensive stoppers."
If that's an accurate label, Samantha and Finley deserve credit for saving the Utes' season.
Utah's 59-53 defeat of Oregon State merits such a description, for the moment. Doubt that? Just imagine where this team would have been with another home-court loss, after having ransacked visiting Pac-12 opponents last season.
In the end, this thing turned into the kind of hard-working victory that former Utah State coach Stew Morrill could appreciate. Morrill watched from the second row, as a mentor of Krystkowiak and OSU coach Wayne Tinkle from their Montana days together.
All it took was timely trip (and technical foul) by the Beavers, OSU's flurry of missed shots and just enough Utah free throws to give the Utes a victory they definitely earned. Utah center Jakob Poeltl labeled the exercise "a grind, throughout the whole game," which is something nobody said about any conference contest in this building last year — until champion Arizona came to town for Senior Night, anyway.
The State of the Utes is a lot different these days. The same is true of the rest of the Pac-12, with restored talent and depth making any comparisons to 2014-15 seem silly for the Utes and everybody else. A year after going 13-5 in the Pac-12, the Utes easily could have started 1-4. Having gone 2-3, Utah is in a four-way tie for seventh place. Viewed more favorably, the Utes are one game out of third with 13 to play.
Yet they trailed OSU by 10 points with barely nine minutes remaining, and some degree of panic would have been understandable around here if the Utes had lost Sunday. Everybody recognized that, even Tinkle. "They had no choice but to amp it up," he said.
Afterward, the Utes partly played along with the season-saving angle, with Krystkowiak saying his team "teetered on not a very good direction" after a loss at Stanford to open conference play, followed by a defeat at California and Thursday's home loss to Oregon.
Krystkowiak's halftime theme? "Stickin' with the plan," he said.
The players' response? "We need to stop, like, fooling around," said Poeltl, recounting a conversation.
Eventually, such strategy worked. Having formerly exploited Utah's defensive freelancing, the Beavers produced only five points on their last 15 possessions of the game. In the final five minutes, after Tres Tinkle's layup gave OSU a 52-50 lead, the visitors' offensive log went miss, technical foul, turnover, miss, miss, 1 of 2 free throws, desperation miss.
That explains how the Utes delivered closing runs of 21-5 and 9-1. The technical requires its own discussion, with this disclaimer: The whole sequence cost the Beavers exactly one point. Sure, that point that gave Utah its first lead of the game, but it was one point. OSU's Jarmal Reid was ejected for trying to trip referee Tommy Nunez, with Reid apparently angry that nothing was called as he hit the floor after stealing the ball from Poeltl.
The Utes failed to take full advantage of that opportunity, but they kept stopping OSU and managed to pull away gradually from the free-throw line.
Utah never agonized this much in January or most of February last season, when beating each of the first eight visiting teams from the Pac-12 by 15-plus points. Oregon immediately established a different trend Thursday in throttling the Utes by 18 points, and the Beavers reinforced it by leading for 37 minutes Sunday.
The Oregon schools were the only Pac-12 members that didn't play in the Huntsman Center last season. That's just another factor making 2015-16 look and feel so different for Utah.
After his team survived Sunday, Krystkowiak said sincerely, "I'd like to believe it's not going to get much harder than this."
Personally, I wouldn't be too sure of that.
Twitter: @tribkurt