CHICAGO -- Coming out of the break against Ohio State in the first round of the Big Ten Tournament, Wisconsin found itself staring at an 18 point deficit - the same amount of points it had tallied in the half.

Needing to put together some kind of rally, the team opened the second half 1-for-8 from the field, had just two points through just under five minutes and allowed the Buckeyes to extend their lead to 27.

"I thought we looked really hesitant," head coach Greg Gard said of the team's play before rallying in the second half. "Just some looks on some guys faces that I haven't seen before. I think the biggest thing was just be more aggressive on both ends of the floor."

That pause, tension and hesitant play came just a little over 24 hours after Gard sat in the Kohl Center media room and said he thought the group had found a happy medium of being loose and serious about the post-season. A half hour before Gard met with the media Tuesday, Tyler Wahl said they were loose because there were no expectations.

"It hurts because we knew what we were getting ourselves into," Wahl said after a 65-57 loss to Ohio State. "We knew the position we put ourselves into needing to come out here and win the game, and we definitely did not start with the urgency that we needed to. I do like the way that we fought back, but at the end of the day we've just got to be better."

The eight-point defeat on the first day of the Big Ten tournament likely burst the NCAA Tournament bubble for a team that started the year 11-2 and reached the top 15 in the first AP Poll of 2023. Cutting what was a 27-point deficit down to five with 2:13 left to play, the opening 25 minutes of action was yet another addition to a long list of gut-wrenching defeats.

Wisconsin would have been sweating out the Selection Sunday process had it lost to Iowa on Thursday afternoon as opposed to the first-round exit. Now it is left hoping the resume it put together through the first two months of the season is enough for a chance to play in the NCAA Tournament.

"We know who we got in the locker room," freshman Connor Essegian said. "We know the talent within the locker room. We're here for a reason, and I know there's a lot more that we could have done this season so far. I'm just hoping we're able to really prove people wrong."

Wisconsin's resume includes wins over Marquette on the road, USC and Dayton on a neutral site, Maryland at home, Penn State, Michigan and a sweep of Iowa. For as much as they did at the start of the year, its body of work easily could have included wins over Kansas, Purdue, Michigan State, Michigan and potentially one or two more in the conference tournament.

UW's post-season run is now cut short at the start of the second week of March without an opportunity to tack on a few more wins. For a team that could return the entirety of its rotation if Wahl elects to take advantage of an extra year of eligibility, the lessons from an early exit could be put to use when October rolls around.

"I don't know. I'm not a bracketologist," Gard said. "You can look around and find differing opinions. If we are, we'll get ready to go and do that, and if we're not, we've had a lot of opportunities to put ourselves in position. So résumé comparison and all that stuff -- we wanted to come in here and try to win this thing. That was the goal that we talked about. Then you end up wherever you are after that. So I said to this group hopefully we have more basketball to play."

Much like the win over Minnesota just three days earlier, the halftime adjustments Gard and his staff relayed weren't ground breaking. The team needed to match the urgency and aggressiveness Ohio State came out with. Part of the issue early for Wisconsin on the offensive end was an inability to knock down open looks. Opportunities were tough to come by with the Buckeyes bumping the Badgers around screens and playing aggressive on the defensive end.

"I feel like seeing those shots not go in definitely played on us and it affected our defense," Wahl said. "They were super aggressive and we were not sound on defense by the start of it. And from the shots not going in, we just dug ourselves in a huge hole, and it was hard to come back from that."

A unlikely bunch got things rolling for the team with the intangibles that were lacking through the first 25 minutes. Jordan Davis checked in with 17:54 left to play and wouldn't find a seat back on the bench until there were five minutes left to play. Carter Gilmore subbed in a minute later with 16:17 left and played the next 12 minutes. Contributing in a similar pocket of minutes, Kamari McGee checked in with 13 minutes to go and with five minutes to go.

When Davis entered, the Badgers had a 22-point hole to work their way out of. By the time the trio exited in favor of Essegian, Crowl and Hepburn, a deficit that was once as large as 27 was trimmed to 14 before the starters worked to cut it to four with 52 seconds left.

Had the spark come a little earlier or from the jump to start the game, Gard and the Badgers could very well be prepping for a matchup with Iowa Thursday afternoon. Now, the formerly inexperienced bunch of players will be asked to channel the lessons learned in a setting with much lower stakes than they had hoped.

"There's been a lot of lessons that haven't been pleasant to go through that these guys have experienced and that's what I talked about afterwards, that we have to be able to use these to our advantage no matter what happens the rest of this year and going forward," Gard said. "We obviously have maturing to do in some of these areas and we've seen that. I think that's the one thing with younger teams is the inconsistency and sometimes we change colors right within a game. Today's a good example of being put on our heels in the first half and then getting back to who we need to be in the second half. That's always a challenge with a younger group to have them understand that and always approach it that way, and it usually comes more natural and more consistent with older guys.

"So that's something we've got to continue - I've got to help them with it and leadership has to grow organically within. There's a lot of hurtful lessons this year that we've had to go through that have stung that we have to bottle and use to our advantage. It's just been a lot of frustrating results at times and I can't say that I didn't know, I didn't see this coming in terms of just things we had to grow through. The only way you grow through it is you have to go through it. Adversity and some of those adjectives that align with that are most often the best teachers. They have to go through it and understand how important it is in order to be a good, consistent team."

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