By JOHN BOHNENKAMP

IOWA CITY — The Big Ten men’s basketball race is still the same length, but now with more teams.

You don’t want to be chasing everyone else, certainly not on December 3, when the full heat of the 20-game crucible was still a few weeks away.

Iowa has faced that pursuit before. The Hawkeyes came into this season having won just two of the 12 games they’ve played in December since the expansion to a 20-game league schedule forced an earlier start to the season.

They’ve gone 0-2 in December conference four times in the last six seasons. Sometimes they’ve dug out of that hole with a furious February run, but it’s not something you can do every year, especially now when the league is 18 teams instead of 14 and that traffic jam seems more crowded.

Eight-tenths of a second remained in the Hawkeyes’ game against Northwestern at Carver-Hawkeye Arena on Tuesday night.

Eight-tenths of a second remained before Iowa fell into another December hole.

Then Josh Dix snapped the net with a perfect 35-foot fall-away 3-pointer, the Hawkeyes had an 80-79 win, and that hole disappeared.

Iowa won its Big Ten opener for the first time since the 2019-20 season, and Payton Sandfort, who has seen too many of these chases the Hawkeyes have created in the last three years, couldn’t help but smile.

“I mean, if that’s the way it had to happen, I guess that’s the way it had to happen,” Sandfort said.

It left Northwestern coach Chris Collins sighing, and the last thing he wanted to be doing on December 3 with a long conference schedule ahead was lamenting a road win that got away.

“Welcome to Big Ten basketball, 2024,” he said. “This league’s a heck of a league. A lot of good teams along the way.”

This was one the Hawkeyes couldn’t lose. It was only a year ago that in a span of a week, Iowa lost on the road at Purdue and at home against Michigan, defeats that sandwiched a crushing road loss to rival Iowa State. Three defeats, all by double digits, and even though the Hawkeyes were able to make one of those February charges to get into position to get into position to get into the NCAA tournament, that week changed the dynamic of the season.

So, here Iowa was again — this game, then a road game against Michigan on Saturday, then a home game next Thursday against No. 6 Iowa State. Lose this one, a home game, and the pressure would have mounted to survive this stretch to avoid another January-February scramble.

The Hawkeyes were up 17 points in the first half, 11 at halftime, and then were down 74-68 with 2:15 left to play in the game.

“We stayed in the fight,” Iowa coach Fran McCaffery said. “And I’m proud of the guys.”

Iowa had the ball with a little less than six seconds remaining, down 79-77, when Sandfort, McCaffery and Dix all stepped up at key moments.

Pryce Sandfort had the ball in front of the Iowa bench with the opportunity to take the winning shot, but his brother thought something was amiss and called a timeout.

“It didn’t look good what we had going,” Sandfort said.

The clock read :00.3, but a replay review added five-tenths of a second.

Then McCaffery called a play that he later said was exactly the same as the one that got Jordan Bohannon free for the winning 3-pointer to beat, yep, Northwestern, by the score of, yep, 80-79, back in 2019.

“Deja vu,” Collins said.

There were options on the play. Brock Harding, who was inbounding the ball, could have fired a lob pass to Owen Freeman, or found Sandfort, or got the ball to Dix at the top of the 3-point arc close to the Iowa bench.

“Any time you run a play, there’s multiple options,” McCaffery said. “And they took away two or three of them — they locked up and they chased Payton, and they were mugging Owen on the back pick. So your last option is Josh.”

“We ran kind of like a tip play for Owen, but I told Brock, if it’s not open, I’ll try and get open at the top to get a shot off,” Dix said. “And he hit me, so I just tried to make it.”

Dix got it off with three-tenths of a second to spare, rising above Northwestern’s Ty Barry to score the last of his 22 points. Barry turned and watched as the ball went in, and was still staring at the basket as Dix raced away, chased by his happy teammates.

“I didn’t know if it was short,” Dix said of the shot. “It felt maybe like it was short, but it felt like it was straight on.”

“It didn’t look short,” Sandfort said. “That’s all I could see, because I was a decoy in the corner, and I was just praying that it went in.”

“From where I stood, it looked good as soon as it left his hand,” McCaffery said.

Collins knew what his team had let get away.

“I always liken the Big Ten slate to like a 20-round fight, because it’s so hard,” he said. “Especially to win on the road. This is what hurts, because it’s hard to win on the road. And when you put yourself in a position to steal a road win, you’ve got to close the deal because you know how hard road wins are.

“When you start the fight, you want to win the first round, right?”

And there’s still 19 more games to play.

“You can’t have long losing streaks, right?” Collins said. “That’s what gets you. I mean, I don’t think anyone’s going 20-0.

“You know, it would have been great to win tonight. It didn’t happen.”

It happened for the Hawkeyes, who start out at the head of the chase.

“I just can’t say enough about our team’s resiliency, and we’ll learn from it,” McCaffery said. “Got 19 more of these in the league, and some other tough games as well.”

“That’s a Big Ten game,” Sandfort said. “And it feels good to get the first one under the belt.

“It’s the hardest one to get.”

Photo: Iowa’s Josh Dix is hugged by teammate Brock Harding after hitting the game-winning 3-pointer in Tuesday’s 80-79 win over Northwestern. (Keith Gillett/Icon Sportswire)