SOUTH BEND, Ind. – During the withering wait for the law of averages to show some mercy Saturday night, Ben Hansbrough occasionally directed a blank stare toward the Notre Dame bench.
The look was equal parts annoyance and disbelief from the Irish’s bellwether senior guard. Against a surface-of-the-sun hot opponent, it was also a plea for an answer. And when coach Mike Brey provided one in the form of a zone defense, the look didn’t change much.
“When he first called it, I was like, ‘Coach, they’re shooting the heck out of the ball,’ ” Hansbrough said after the No. 16 Irish zoned out Marquette for an uplifting 80-75 victory at Purcell Pavilion. “He just said, ‘Trust me on this.’ It’s the reason we got the ‘W.’ “
It’s the reason Notre Dame (16-4, 5-3 Big East) went from potentially wobbly footing in the conference race to keeping a firm grip. This wasn’t really a get-even game, despite the 22-point drubbing Marquette (13-7, 4-3) applied 12 days earlier.
This was a hold-serve game, all about protecting the home floor against a beatable foe. And the Irish outlasted the Golden Eagles, who shot 53.1 percent on Jan. 10 and 61.5 percent in the first half Saturday before tumbling to 30 percent after halftime.
Where Marquette carved up man-to-man looks before the intermission, it got muddied when the 2-3 zone, in coach Buzz Williams’ estimation, “geared us down.”
“It slowed down their movement a little bit,” Irish forward Tim Abromaitis said. “They were hanging around the perimeter a little bit, and we were able to move pretty well. We challenged shots and then rebounded them too.”
Hansbrough again was the hurricane-force gust behind it all with a career-high 28 points.
He and Eric Atkins combined to score 27 of Notre Dame’s 36 first-half points. Midway through the second half, Hansbrough’s preposterous fade-away 3-pointer at the shot-clock buzzer, followed by a baseline tomahawk jam, capped a 22-6 stretch in which the Irish went from 11 down to five ahead and in control.
“At crunch time,” Brey said, “he was the guy that was going to make us believe.”
Recovering from a 12-point deficit matched the Irish’s biggest second-half comeback of the season, another one worth a seemingly interminable wait.
“We’re exhausted, I’m exhausted,” Hansbrough said. “How many times has this happened to us? And we continue to dig in and we continue to find ways to win when it matters.”