IOWA CITY, Iowa — Payton Sandfort called the bank.

Just ask him.

“I did,” the Iowa senior forward said.

Carter Kingsbury, who passed the ball to Sandfort, confirmed it, although it was more hearsay.

“He wanted me to let you guys know before it went in, he called ‘Bank,'” Kingsbury testified.

There may have been other witnesses.

“The guys sitting courtside hopefully heard it too,” Sandfort said.

Sandfort’s 3-pointer, bank and all, started the Hawkeyes on their second-half rally in Saturday’s 85-79 win over Washington at Carver-Hawkeye Arena.

It was an odd win for Iowa (15-12 overall, 6-10 Big Ten), but the Hawkeyes need any type of win at this point in the season, and if it gets a little weird, well, so be it.

Sandfort’s 3-pointer that caromed off the backboard and through the net with 9:14 to play tied the game at 56, and when Sandfort made all of his free throws after being fouled on another 3-point try 23 seconds later, the Hawkeyes would lead and never trail again, completing a comeback from a nine-point second-half deficit.

Iowa came into the game having lost five of its last six games, putting itself in danger of missing the Big Ten Tournament in a few weeks. Fifteen of the conference’s 18 teams will go to Indianapolis, and this win was good for the standings — the Hawkeyes are tied for 13th place and hold the tiebreakers over the four teams behind them, including Washington (13-14, 4-12) with four games to play.

But there’s something to be said for Iowa’s morale at this point in the season, given the injuries that have forced coach Fran McCaffery to use some strange lineups at times, and this game was no different.

A win, weird or normal or whatever, just felt good.

“We’ve worked so hard and we haven’t had all the bounces go our way this year,” said Sandfort, who led the Hawkeyes with 27 points, 20 coming in the second half. “We haven’t played our best at times. But we’ve stayed together. And I’ve always stressed that to everybody that just stay together and it’ll give us a chance. Because you see teams that spiral, and most of those teams, they just completely fall apart, they start blaming each other, doing all that. But we’ve loved each other.”

“He’s an emotional guy,” McCaffery said of Sandfort. “He wants it bad. He puts the time in. He’s in the gym all the time on his own, and he wants to be successful. He believes in himself, so it’s important that he control his emotions, because of how serious he is about his craft.”

Sandfort came back for his final season after going through the NBA draft process last spring, and he had one specific goal in mind. Sandfort has played in NCAA tournaments, and has a Big Ten Tournament title on his resumé, and he wanted others to have that taste.

“All I’ve ever wanted for the last two years was just for some of these younger guys, like Pryce (Sandfort, Payton’s younger brother) and them, to see success, have fun with this, because it’s a fun journey,” Sandfort said. “And, you know, it’s been hard, but that’s what makes days like this rewarding. You stay in the fight, you keep fighting. We had a lot of guys step up, and I’m proud of everybody.”

This was another mix-and-match day for McCaffery, who has had to be creative with Iowa’s depth, especially in the last couple of weeks with sophomore Owen Freeman out for the rest of the season with a hand injury and starting guard Drew Thelwell struggling to come back from an injured ankle.

When it was clear early that the Hawkeyes were struggling to handle Great Osobor, the 6-foot-8 forward who is Washington’s leading scorer, McCaffery went to Kingsbury, who was giving up three inches and at least 25 pounds to Osobor. Kingsbury ended up playing almost 29 minutes — he averages just 7.7 minutes — and with some help from others held Osobor to just 15 points.

“Osobor’s a handful,” McCaffery said. “He’s 265 (pounds), he’s really strong. I just thought Carter’s strength and physicality would be effective.”

“They had talked to me about guarding Osobor,” Kingsbury said. “I mean, he’s a tough guard, obviously, and he had a good night tonight, but, yeah, we needed multiple guys to be able to guard him tonight, and we knew that, so it was kind of a team effort containing him. I guess we didn’t stop him every single time, but he’s a really good player, and I’m glad we got the stops when we needed them.”

The Hawkeyes got 36 bench points, and McCaffery went down the list of how every player did something, whether it was Brock Harding’s 11 points in the 25 minutes filling in for Thelwell, who re-injured his ankle on Friday, or Pryce Sandfort’s eight points, or the 17 points combined from Riley Mulvey and Even Brauns.

Mulvey, who had nine points, had the biggest defensive play in the second half by drawing an offensive foul on what could have been an otherwise embarrassing moment.

Mulvey came up with a steal off a bad pass from Osobor, but Washington’s Tyler Harris knocked the ball away from Mulvey and it bounced toward the center of the court. Huskies center Franck Kepnang grabbed the ball and bulled back toward the basket, with only Mulvey in the way. Kepnang took off from the Big Ten logo in the lane and plowed over Mulvey for the posterizing dunk, but was called for the offensive foul.

“It was a kind of a strange play in a lot of ways, but it’s just a smart play by a smart player,” McCaffery said. “It’s a game-winning play when you really need one.”

“All I saw was somebody who was not going to do anything besides go to the basket and try to dunk it, so I just stood right in the way and took a charge,” Mulvey said, smiling, as Kingsbury started laughing.

It was Kingsbury who hit a crucial 3-pointer in an 8-0 run at the end of the first half that got Iowa within 34-33 at halftime. And he was the one who made the pass to Sandfort on the 3-pointer that tied the game.

The Hawkeyes were inbounding the ball with less than four seconds on the shot clock. Kingsbury corralled the pass from Pryce Sandfort, and then tossed the ball to Payton Sandfort for the shot.

“First, Pryce threw a mediocre pass,” Kingsbury said, grinning at the jab he had given his teammate. “Just get up and get it. And you know, Payton, he can get on fire. So just get him the ball in his hands. That’s a tough shot.”

“There’s been countless games where teams have just changed momentum with banked-in threes,” Sandfort said. “So we got our own and then, after that, I think everyone started having fun, and we kind of loosened up. I screamed out, ‘Bank,’ and I think everybody heard me. And then I was telling everybody that I screamed out, ‘Bank’, and then we kind of just loosened up, and everyone started making plays again.”

“It’s the kind of team we have,” McCaffery said. “We’ve got to really compete and stay together and just keep grinding. It didn’t look good at the start of the game. Didn’t look good to start the second half. But we hung in there.”

Photo: Iowa’s Payton Sandfort (right) and Brock Harding celebrate in the closing seconds of Saturday’s win over Washington. (Keith Gillett/Icon Sportswire)