BLOOMINGTON – This looked like a tricky game for Indiana.

Rolling Minnesota, early tipoff on a Friday night with weather expected, five days before Purdue and three days after a fiasco of turnovers and missed free throws at Rutgers. The Gophers arrived on a seven-game win streak, surprising the conference with their dangerousness across a 3-1 Big Ten start and with nothing really to lose as road underdogs in one of the league’s toughest venues.

Indiana, still smarting from that Rutgers loss, arrived knowing a bigger game lay in wait over the hill. Both because of the weight of rivalry in this sport in this state, and also because that game might by itself have the capacity to turn the Hoosiers’ season for better or for worse, permanently.

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Friday night’s game should have been difficult for Mike Woodson’s team.

Friday night’s game was over in eight minutes.

And no one was more important to the manner of victory — or frankly the victory itself — than Mackenzie Mgbako, the player who more than any other Hoosier holds his team’s fortunes between now and the end of this season in his hands.

“I thought he was aggressive right from the start. I thought our whole team was aggressive on both ends of the floor,” IU coach Mike Woodson said. “(Mgbako) got some good looks early that he made. I ran a couple plays for him that he was able to knock shots down, and the way they double-team, it opened him up.”

Mgbako scored a game- and career-high 19 points, in a 74-62 win over Minnesota that was scantly even that close. The Gophers were second best in every way in what turned out to be the most important phase of the game: the first two media-timeout segments, when IU (12-5, 4-2) opened a 25-8 lead, put inarguably Minnesota’s two most important players in foul trouble and, with downhill aggressiveness and relentless pressure, buried the visitors.

The Hoosiers, who didn’t actually make it home from New Jersey until Wednesday morning because of the weather, left their turnover problems in Piscataway, and any pity they felt for themselves on the floor of the Rutgers Athletic Center (known contractually as Jersey Mike’s Arena).

Minnesota (12-4, 3-2) looked like a gopher hole — pun absolutely intended — for Indiana’s horse to step into, a hot team with virtually nothing to lose facing up to one that could be forgiven its concerns and doubts.

The Gophers typically score the ball efficiently, and share it remarkably well, and yet this game was never close. Minnesota’s best effort cut the deficit to five, late in the first half. The only 18 seconds of the game Indiana did not lead were the 18 seconds Indiana needed to score its first basket, a Trey Galloway 3-pointer, Assembly Hall, sold out and rowdy despite the impending weather.

“Once we started the game aggressive, it carried over on to our defense, and then defense creates offense,” Mgbako said. “Just being aggressive on both sides of the floor is what created the win tonight.”

This is the formula for the Hoosiers, if they are to make this season into what they want it to be. Branch McCracken Court must be a fortress. Road teams must be required their best effort and their hardest fight just to make anything of a trip to Bloomington, against an undeniably imperfect but — as Friday night showed — still remarkably talented team.

Make Bloomington a difficult place for opponents to come across these next two months, and this team can scrap out for itself the results necessary to demand a place in the NCAA tournament.

But it will take all of what the Hoosiers showed Friday, and precious little of what they showed Tuesday, this week providing a remarkably timed juxtaposition of IU at its worst, compared to IU at its best.

“We've got to somehow convert how we play here at home on the road,” Woodson said. “That's going to be the difference moving forward.”

And while Mgbako need not do most or all of it himself, Friday night provided the latest and perhaps most convincing evidence he is the as-yet-undefined number that changes the calculus for this team.

Kel’el Ware and Malik Reneau (33 points, 20 rebounds Friday) will always produce in the post. Xavier Johnson can be mercurial, even frustrating, and Tuesday reminded us his game will at times cross certain lines. But he is also remarkably creative, and when his focus is properly trained he is dogged on defense.

Friday was the best of Galloway, Kansas game excepted, his 10 points, two 3s, three rebounds and seven assists all crucial. There were important contributions from Gabe Cupps, Anthony Walker, CJ Gunn — that looks like Indiana’s bench for the foreseeable future, Woodson paring his rotation down earlier in the calendar, perhaps, than he did in either of his first two years.

There’s so much that feels, if not settled, then at least proven about these Hoosiers, good and bad. The one open question is perhaps the biggest of the season, even dating back as far as June and July, when this team came together to begin the process of making something of itself.

Mgbako is — not just because of his five-star billing or his All-American status in high school but simply his obvious gifts, traits and abilities — the player with both the greatest ceiling, and the clearest ability to raise his team’s as well.

You saw it Friday night.

The downhill assertiveness against defenders incapable of managing Mgbako’s blend of length, size and athleticism on the drive. The reach and instincts that, finally applied consistently on defense, make him a frustrating matchup. The 3-point shot that has not-so-quietly come around — Mgbako is shooting 38.9% from behind the arc over his past 12 games, and 45.5% (10-of-22) from range in Big Ten play.

This isn’t meant to suggest none of his teammates can or will improve across the coming weeks. Reneau clearly already has. Ware remains somewhere south of his prodigious and almost certainly NBA-ready ceiling. Should Galloway find more of the offensive and creative consistency he’s shown beginning with the Kansas game (when he scored 28 points), he can be a difference maker for this team.

The list goes on. But it starts and it stops with Mgbako. Indiana will insist upon playing him at the three, unless in case of emergency, for the rest of this season. That will certainly challenge him again defensively, but it will also present more nights like Friday, when he faces a cover so much shorter, so much less athletic and so clearly overmatched Mgbako will find, if he works for them, stretches of the game which he can very simply dominate.

Earlier this season, Woodson flatly disagreed with the notion a player of Mgbako’s top-10 billing should simply be expected to arrive in college the finished article. Woodson promised his freshman forward would continue to improve, both technically and tactically, as he spent more time at the college level, an improvement Mgbako now both shows and, crucially, recognizes.

“He's put the work in,” Woodson said. “He's continuing to work, along with the rest of our young players. All we can do as coaches is continue to teach and push and try to get as much out of them as we can as we continue this journey.”

For one of the most distinct players — because of his position, his skills and his role within his team — in the Big Ten, the curve finally appears to be steepening toward Mgbako’s best.

The more that curve climbs, the better Mgbako gets, the more he understands what he’s capable of and what’s required of him and why he makes such a remarkable difference for his team, the higher Indiana’s own ceiling climbs. No player currently enjoys greater influence over either the course, or the outcome, of this season in Bloomington.

Follow IndyStar reporter Zach Osterman on Twitter: @ZachOsterman.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Indiana basketball: Mackenzie Mgbako starting to live up to hype