Dave Boling: These days nothing is certain, but this Gonzaga team grew together and may keep getting better

DETROIT – Gonzaga’s men dominated so thoroughly the first week of the NCAA Tournament, it almost seemed like they had been sandbagging during much of this inconsistent season.

Could they have been setting up overconfident opponents to get hustled now that they were unleashing their best selves?

No matter. Purdue wasn’t suckered in the least, and in a game eerily similar to two previous losses to the Boilermakers since the start of last season, the Zags withered in the second half in an 80-68 loss in the Sweet 16 round.

Coming in as a No. 5 seed, and getting all the way to the Sweet 16 (for a ninth consecutive year) seems like playing with house money.

But they so thoroughly throttled Kansas last week in the second round, it wasn’t hard to start envisioning a longer tournament run. They certainly looked nothing like a team that couldn’t win its conference title nor the conference tournament this season.

Purdue was not only a top seed and the No. 4 team in the country, but is a terrible matchup for the Zags.

Seven-foot-four post Zach Edey showed, again, why he’s likely to win his second national player of the year award, with 27 points and 14 rebounds.

As expected of teams trying to joust with Edey in the low post, two of the Zags’ big men, Graham Ike and Anton Watson, fouled out. Edey, meanwhile, was whistled only twice while giving as good as he got.

Can’t remember, in the biblical story, if Goliath got so much protection from Philistine officials.

Edey isn’t the only problem when facing Purdue, though, as guard Braden Smith had 14 points and 15 assists.

GU made a couple of second-half runs, but Purdue refused to cooperate with mistakes or missed shots.

What, then, to make of a season in which the Zags fell out of the Top 25 rankings for the first time since 2016? Even late in the regular season, their run of consecutive tournament berths – intact for the entire 21st century – seemed endangered.

“I think the majority of teams in college basketball probably would have folded up there in January, based on the expectations that we have in our program and what we were dealing with,” coach Mark Few said. “But these guys, they doubled down and they showed their real character and competed and (grew) even closer instead of pulling apart.”

This season tested the Zags like few others, getting off to a slow start, early losses, a lineup change. They faced pressures unknown to many of their predecessors. These were character reveals, a chance to see what was at their core.

Consider it indicative and encouraging that so many of the players in the locker room were already talking about next year. Nothing is certain anymore in college sports, but it’s possible Few will lose only Watson. A huge loss, to be sure, as he’s been a veteran leader and stabilizing force for years.

Afterward, Zags players had nothing but praise for Purdue, a team that has conclusively proved it can beat GU as long as Edey is in the uniform.

“He’s a tough guard, not something you see every day,” Ike said. “Kudos to him, he’s a great player and they have a great team around him.”

Jokingly, I asked the 6-9 Ike, who was giving up 7 inches to Edey, if he could feel a growth spurt coming on before next season.

“Hey, I’m optimistic … another inch would be great,” he said. “If not, I’ll just keep getting better on the court. Nobody wearing a Zag uniform is going to go into any game feeling pessimistic or that we can’t win it.”

Ike noted that, in January, “nobody thought we’d be here.”

True enough.

“Obviously, you want to win your last game, that was our team goal,” junior forward Ben Gregg said. “We’re proud of where we got to, given the adversity we faced, but we expected more of ourselves.”

Losing Watson will “be huge,” Gregg said, “but we’re going to be very hungry going into this offseason because we got a taste for going this far, and we want to go further than this.”

If the available manpower stays intact, the Zags could start out with the kind of high ranking they’ve been accustomed to for the past two decades or so.

If that’s the case, they will owe many of the lessons learned to the 2023-24 season, a strange one, a revelatory one – a season in which the staff and players had to face uncommon adversities.

As Few said, when they could have unraveled, they pulled in tighter.

“You could see the way we play together and how we interact, it’s truly a brotherhood,” Gregg said. “That phrase gets thrown around a lot, but all these guys in the locker room are brothers. That’s why it hurts so much to end on a loss. Everybody is playing for each other.”

Gregg gestured across the quiet locker room. No tears were seen, nor faces hidden by towels. Just quiet talk and answering of reporters’ questions.

“It didn’t go our way, but we’ll embrace everything that happened to us,” Gregg said. “And we’ll be proud of ourselves and hold our heads up high.”