When Kanye Clary hit the floor, fans started leaving.

As Penn State men’s basketball watched its lead against Minnesota collapse on its home court, Clary did the same. The sophomore ran into the elbow of Golden Gopher Parker Fox and hit the deck. Penn State lost 83-74 in an arena full of people heading for the exits. Clary, along with fellow guard Nick Kern Jr., wouldn’t return to the game while they were evaluated for injuries.

Kern was fine. It didn’t take long for head coach Mike Rhoades to announce Kern was cleared to play at Rutgers. Clary, however, was named a day-to-day consideration.

When Penn State hit the road for its next two matches, Clary wasn’t available to play. So the Nittany Lions, winless outside of the state of Pennsylvania during Rhoades’ tenure, seemed doomed to lose in New Jersey and Indiana.

Penn State won both games.

The first win came in an ugly game against Rutgers. It was a huge win for Penn State simply because the team had only won in the Bryce Jordan Center and The Palestra, but still, it was Rutgers.

Indiana was a different animal. The Hoosiers showed that early in the first half, taking a lead that stretched to 11 points after 15 minutes. This wasn’t the Rutgers team that had a 2-7 in-conference record. This was the Indiana Hoosiers, who were fighting to keep their NCAA Tournament dreams alive every time they walked onto the court.

After cutting the Hoosiers’ lead down to four points before halftime, Penn State didn’t look back. In an 85-71 upset victory, five Nittany Lions scored in the double digits as Ace Baldwin Jr. and Co. turned one road victory into a two-game streak.

Against Indiana, Penn State didn’t look like the team it had been through the rest of the season. That team fell into a pit dug up by the Golden Gophers of Minnesota, got cracked by the Buckeyes of Ohio State, and was steamrolled by the Boilermakers of Purdue.

Rhoades said postgame those experiences helped the Nittany Lions engineer their comeback in Bloomington. When the team did its share of losing against other Big Ten teams, eventually, it figured out how to avoid that.

“We’ve been doing it all year long. We’ve been we’ve been very inconsistent throughout this year,” Rhoades said. “We’ve been through a lot of stuff this year, [but] you’re always your best teacher.”

Normally, with Clary on the roster, the team would look to him to slice through a defense, drive to the rim, or nail a three-pointer under pressure. But without Clary available, Penn State had to turn to its bench to find someone who could replace its star.

As it turned out, there were multiple replacements. Jameel Brown, another leftover from Micah Shrewsberry’s tenure at Penn State, put on a clinic in Clary’s stead against Indiana by hitting four of his five shots from three-point range. He was helped by D’Marco Dunn, who usually serves as Clary’s immediate replacement off the bench, and Kern, who scored 19 points.

Penn State needed to be prepared to play without Clary, Rhoades said. Ironically, Clary’s injury helped Brown and Dunn prepare better for the Indiana contest.

“Not having Kanye, it gave other guys more time on Wednesday night as well as Rutgers on the road. So that helped to get experience-wise coming in here today,” Rhoades said. “They don’t cancel the season if a player is injured. They don’t cancel the game because somebody’s sick. It’s got to be the next man up, so you can go into it already making excuses or you can say, ‘Let’s figure this out anyway.'”

As is standard with Penn State, the comeback was led by Baldwin, who scored a team-high 22 points while nailing eight assists and two steals. Rhoades, who’s coached Baldwin since the pair worked together at VCU, brought Baldwin from an underperforming fifth-year senior to the star he was meant to be.

“His competitiveness is elite. In a shooting drill, heck, playing ping pong, whatever it may be, it’s elite,” Rhoades said. “He wants to win more than anything. He would play today and not score a point or take a shot if he knew his team would win.”

Days prior, Penn State played some of its worst-ever basketball in the second half against Minnesota. It was unmotivated and didn’t reflect any of the grit that graced the program in the Shrewsberry era.

Against Indiana, though, Penn State showed up. The Nittany Lions didn’t quit when they were down by 10 points, putting together a mini-comeback in the first half. When Indiana reextended its lead to that 11-point difference, Penn State bounced right back. Now that the Nittany Lions have won on the road, Rhoades said, they know what they’re really capable of.

One week after Baldwin helped Clary off the floor as his own fans started to think about leaving the Bryce Jordan Center, Baldwin strode through the handshake line in Indiana, waving goodbye to the folks dressed in red and white as they raced to the parking lot.