COLUMBUS, Ohio

So thoroughly bubblicious was the Big 10 collision last night between Ohio State and Penn State, that ESPN hectored, of all people, Brent Musberger and Steve Lavin and even Erin Andrews off into the heartland as part of something called Super Tuesday.

The notion that even a bogus election could get Penn State into the NCAA tournament is a perpetually suspect proposition, but it has been no kind of typical winter for the Nittany Lions, who got here last night holding down fourth place in a conference in which they're generally lucky to manage four wins.

Not only that, they'd beaten the three teams in front of them and had just had their bubble swollen by a quasi-ridiculous, 38-33 road win against then 18th-ranked Illinois.

Ohio State, not two years removed from a spot in the national championship game against Florida, was clinging to some middling conference station and wasn't far removed from authentic bubble-team status even as most professors of bracketology were working with NCAA models that included Thad Matta's team in spite of itself.

In other words, this event represented a bubble bigger than your head.

Lose this one, and you pick gum out of your eyebrows for the next three weeks, which is no way to make it to distant March.

Penn State is that team this morning, looking awfully pretentious after scoring only four baskets in the last nine minutes and watching a real mediocre Buckeyes edition walk off with a 73-59 victory the Nittany Lions pretty much had to have.

"We didn't get what we wanted tonight, but I think that all year we've been trying to impress upon people that we're a good team," said Penn State's Jamelle Cornley, the former Mr. Basketball in Ohio whose homecoming was again less than stirring. "We didn't hit our shots in the second half, but I think the [tournament selection committee] will have to consider us a pretty good team. We still have three games to go plus the Big Ten tournament to right ourselves."

All true enough for the moment, but the Lions might have let too many flattering angles get dulled by extended bursts of incompetence last night. They had a chance for an unprecedented fourth conference road win, a chance to snap a 10-game losing streak to Ohio State, a chance to nail down their first 20-win season in the past eight years, a chance to make a national TV audience forget for a moment that, since the Lions joined the Big Ten in 1992, they're 89-194 in the conference.

"Penn State has definitely been playin' good basketball," said Buckeyes point guard P.J. Hill, who started his first game in place of the slumping Jeremie Simmons. "They won at Indiana and won at Michigan State, but, you know, we're playing for seedings now, both in the Big Ten and in the NCAA tournament, so this is a great resume-builder for us."

The Buckeyes seemed to have all the references they needed by building a 19-2 lead in the game's first eight minutes, but the Lions turned Ohio State's 16-0 run totally inside out, running off the next 16 points and jumping ahead, 25-23, on Cornley's layup with 6:30 remaining. Too bad they don't hand out tournament invitations for blasting out of a 17-point first-half deficit.

"Penn State hit some incredible shots to get back into it," said Matta, who is 71-2 against unranked opponents at Ohio State. "But I thought we kept our composure, and everyone gave us something at some point in the game."

Penn State was hoping for some style points on composure as well, and managed to construct a labor intensive, 46-41 lead in the first eight minutes of the second half. But, when Danny Morrison's third 3-ball of the night slipped into the net from the right wing with 9:05 remaining, it carried with it the Lions' last lead, 49-48.

Ed DeChellis' plodding offense, which runs very little for a ensemble with such athleticism, more than has been seen at Penn State in ages, then got shut out for five full minutes. In the interim, Ohio State went from down 1 to up 10

"We just didn't execute real well at times," said DeChellis, the Monaca native who still has a broken bubble's chance of getting Penn State into the NCAA tournament for the first time since 2001. "We dribbled the ball way too much. We didn't make the extra pass. We had some open shots we didn't make, and we took some really tough shots too."

Probably not as tough as some of the shots the bracketologists will be taking in the wake of the game. No one needs any ammunition to exclude Penn State from the madness to come. The Lions provided some anyway. If the Nittany Lions end up in the NIT, it will be considered a step forward for a program that went four consecutive years in this decade without winning 10 games in any of them. For Penn State basketball, almost any step remains a step forward.