CHAMPAIGN, Ill — IU women's basketball came into the final stretch of the season with very little room for error.

The Hoosiers were the No. 15 overall seed in the first NCAA tournament top-16 overview Sunday night, giving them a one-spot margin before they fell out of hosting the first two rounds of the tournament.

That ranking meant IU (21-4, 12-3) needed to be nearly perfect — the Hoosiers needed to win every game, except against maybe Iowa, in the rest of the regular season. Basically, if the Hoosiers could end the season 3-1 and get to the semifinals of the Big Ten tournament (winning only one game with the presumed double-bye), they could cling on to that hosting seed.

Coming into Monday, IU was sitting solidly at third place in the Big Ten — four games ahead of fourth-place Nebraska, which sits at 9-6 in conference. For the Hoosiers, three wins over three teams in the bottom half of the conference should have been an easy ask.

Instead, IU lost to Illinois for the first time in 11 years. The Illini are 1-16 in their past 17 games against the Hoosiers. It may seem arbitrary — a one-off victory for the Illini doesn’t mean they are suddenly better than the reigning Big Ten champion Hoosiers.

But for the Hoosiers, there was more at stake. After a No. 2 national ranking, Big Ten title, and a No. 1 seed in the NCAA tournament last season, the Hoosiers have been clinging to national relevance this year.

“I don’t take losing very well,” senior center Mackenzie Holmes said, her voice breaking. “I only have a few games left in the regular season, so we just gotta figure it out. We got to figure out how to come from behind. I gotta be better at protecting the rim. It’s just, I’m not a good loser. That’s all there is to it.”

IU came into this year with sky-high expectations — they were only losing one starter (Grace Berger), and they had Sara Scalia, who could easily slide into that starting spot. But Berger encompassed more than just one starter. She was the leader of last year's team, willing it to victories the Hoosiers could only dream about with her unique shot-creating and ability to adapt.

IU isn’t as good this year. What the Hoosiers always had going for them, though, is that it could always deliver when it needed to. In the past few years, it beat the teams it was supposed to beat, and competed (and sometimes even won) against the teams that were better.

This season, that competitiveness against top teams has nearly dissolved.

It started against Stanford in November — IU was nearly laughed out of the building in Palo Alto, letting a 26-point first quarter from the Cardinal balloon into a 33-point loss. It happened again against Iowa in January. After going toe-to-toe against the Hawkeyes in the past two years, the Hoosiers left a barren and snowy Iowa City with an 84-57 loss.

Now, the Hoosiers are registering 20-point losses to teams like Illinois, which came into the game with a 6-8 Big Ten record. Yes, IU had an off day. The Hoosiers didn’t look like themselves, they didn’t play like themselves, and it’s not indicative of their play as a whole season.

But the Big Ten, and the top echelon of women’s basketball as a whole, is relentless. IU can’t afford to have an off day, especially against a middling conference team, if it wants to stay in the national conversation and host NCAA games.

Still, the Hoosiers did.

“We’re very, very, very disappointed,” Moren said. “I thought we executed poorly. We were a little bit out of sorts, I don’t know if that’s because we’re not used to playing from behind, but on a day where you do get behind, you got to be able to execute at a high level.”

So, where do they go from here?

It will take a miracle for IU to win even a share of the Big Ten regular season title at this point. Ohio State is at 13-1 in the conference, and with the Buckeyes’ final four games of the season coming against Maryland, Penn State, Michigan and Iowa, they will likely, at worst, go 3-1.

Iowa, at 12-2 in the conference, finishes the regular season with Indiana, Illinois, Minnesota and Ohio State. The Hawkeyes could win out, at best, but the more likely scenario is 3-1 with a loss to the Buckeyes.

Either way, for Indiana to nab just a share of the title, it would need to beat Iowa, then hope Ohio State loses two of its games.

“We have to flush it, we got to move on,” Moren said. “We got a really good Iowa team that comes into the Hall on Thursday night, and as Mack said, we have three games left in the Big Ten season, and we gotta figure things out. But I can tell you this: We got to be much better on Thursday.”

No matter how well the Hoosiers play from this point on, the Buckeyes control their destiny. With how Ohio State is playing, too, it’s not going to give up a game easily anytime soon.

IU will likely have to give up its hopes of repeating as Big Ten champions.

Still, the Hoosiers are in line to get a double-bye at the Big Ten tournament in Minneapolis. IU could salvage its season of high expectations with a decent showing at the Target Center — including an easy quarterfinal victory, then a good showing (maybe even a win) over Iowa or Ohio State in the semifinal round.

But first, they have things to figure out.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Indiana women's basketball loss to Illinois damaging in multiple ways