BLOOMINGTON – Indiana’s failing season threatened to reach a dramatic new low Wednesday night, when, on course for an 85-70 victory, Nebraska punched 51 points onto the Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall scoreboard in just 20 minutes.

The Hoosiers lost all touch with sharpshooter Keisei Tominaga. They once again lost all confidence in themselves at the other end of the floor. And for the best part of the first hour — in real time — of Wednesday’s game, the Hoosiers (14-12, 6-9) looked like they might be bound for the kind of defeat from which not just a team, or a season, but a program, and a tenure, struggle to recover.

Then, they picked themselves up, if only enough to save some small percentage of pride from an otherwise awful evening. They rallied furiously across the first 8 ½ minutes of the second half, scoring 25 points — only six fewer than their entire first-half output — and cutting Nebraska’s lead to just three.

For a moment, the Cornhuskers (19-8, 9-7) must’ve felt like they were living in a nightmare from which they had been unable to escape all season. Even in a 20-point lead (it actually grew to 22 shortly after halftime) could not wipe away the nagging doubts of their 0-7 Big Ten road record, for Fred Hoiberg’s otherwise NCAA tournament-ready team.

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Assembly Hall responded appropriately when C.J. Gunn’s 3-pointer cut what had been a 51-31 lead to just 59-56, with 11:27 left. One of the Big Ten’s feistiest arenas was on fire, Tominaga had disappeared from Nebraska’s offense and Indiana looked for a fleeting moment like it might — for one night anyway — regain control of the narrative arc of its season.

And then.

Gunn fired a corner 3 short, following a Tominaga travel. Nebraska scored the game’s next seven points, and that was that. Neither ignominious defeat, nor stirring victory.

Just another ugly night, in an ugly run, in an increasing ugly season, for a team by this point visibly incapable of arresting its decline.

Youngest team in the Big Ten. Yes. Too talented to struggle this comprehensively. Yes. Shorn of all confidence in itself. By all measures, probably.

There is nothing particularly special about Indiana’s failure. The Hoosiers are just a badly constructed team, devoid of faith in themselves, waiting for a frustrating but otherwise unremarkable season to wind toward the only result that would appear to do anyone any good anymore: a quiet end.

“When you give up 51 points, in the Big Ten, in a half, you’re not gonna beat anybody. Yeah, we played great in the second half, to cut it to three, but we had no defensive effort, I thought, in the first half,” IU coach Mike Woodson said, before going bigger picture. “We’ve played well enough this year in spurts, but not well enough in complete ball games, and that’s what makes it frustrating.”

This probably sounds reductive — because it probably is — but these are the nights when the impact of Indiana’s shooting problems really becomes clear.

Not just this team’s issues shooting 3s or free throws (though of course these Hoosiers are wearing their own shortcomings), but the wider problems Indiana has had for far too long now.

Only once in the past seven years, if we include this season up to press time Wednesday, has Indiana finished better than 200^th nationally in teamwide 3-point shooting percentage. It was last year, when the Hoosiers finished 354^th nationally in 3s as a percentage of overall field-goal attempts.

Since Archie Miller’s hiring, IU has very nearly never consistently weaponized the 3-point line in an era when pace and space have both dominated and defined basketball as a whole.

It won’t surprise you to know free-throw shooting has been about as poor, if not worse.

These seem like compartmentalized problems. Indiana gives up 51 points in the first half Saturday. This is a defensive failing.

But it’s not. The Hoosiers were outscored by 24 points in the first half from behind the arc. They missed seven free throws in the second half, and 10 in the game. Every coach at every level of basketball says defense should lead to offense but every player at every level of basketball is going to play harder on defense (and on offense) handed the confidence of seeing some shots go in.

Indiana is a young team.

Like it. Hate it. Don’t call it an excuse. Use it as an excuse. Entirely up to you. According to Ken Pomeroy — who let’s be fair has become college basketball gospel — Indiana is the youngest team in the league.

Arguing against that misses the point. IU is young, and IU plays like it. Mistakes are far too common. Confidence is remarkably fragile.

When Woodson bemoans his team age, he’s culpable for some of it, but he’s mostly just a coach trying to solve a problem that’s so far proved unsolvable. There doesn’t need to be much more to it than that.

There will probably have been, on Wednesday night, a more agitated wing of Indiana’s fan base. One so frustrated by performance and trajectory that it can only see a solution in a head-coaching change.

Fair or not, that faction probably hoped for Wednesday to go as badly as it possibly could. Just as fans still supportive of Woodson — and, justifiably, there are many — will have seen that rousing rally in the early part of the second half and hoped, finally, they were watching his team turn a pivotal corner.

In the end, no one really got what they wanted. There was nothing terribly dramatic about Wednesday’s game, neither in how it transpired, nor in its final result.

Just a limited team, on limited time, playing limited basketball, at this point, realistically, counting the days until a season no one will miss finally reaches its conclusion.

Follow IndyStar reporter Zach Osterman on Twitter: @ZachOsterman.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Indiana basketball: Hoosiers loss to Nebraska latest setback for IU