Whew. I don’t want to force parallels on you — and honestly, this wasn’t my intent when it started — but I used to think West Virginia going bonkers from 3-point range in the first half of the Elite Eight game against Kentucky was the oddest thing. (Then came 70-33, so now it’s merely the oddest basketball thing.) That, of course, was in … 2010. I might have to move it aside, because that first half last night, for a wholly different reason, was the oddest thing.

And yet the Mountaineers are playing for the conference title tonight and can win their first crown since … 2010. Seven years ago today, Da’Sean Butler called bank, and WVU beat Cincinnati to start its run in the Big East tournament and then to the Final Four.

More to the point, though, is the fact WVU is getting in the mud and still winning. This isn’t a just-this-week thing. It might not sustain. The good news, I guess, is here comes Iowa State, and the Cyclones seem to bring the best out of the Mountaineers.

They better.

“We’re going to have to score more than 51 probably,” Coach Bob Huggins said.

That’s not a performance just good enough to win. That’s a performance good enough to get you beat by 15. A lot of bad — 28 3-point shots, 14 points in the paint, guh — but why fret? There’s artistry in winning with 51 points. Let’s circle the good things.

Eight turnovers led to one K-State point, 11 K-State turnovers led to 13 WVU points. A 16-5 edge in offensive rebounds yielded a 12-4 advantage in second-chance points. That’s Good WVU. And as wretched as the offense was, the Wildcats were only barely better. Shot 9-for-23 and scored 25 points in each half.

The Mountaineers overcame a lot — a lot — but most notably themselves.

“We definitely played decent defense,” Adrian said. “We scored 16 points and still won the game. Obviously we did something right.”

But this one was about as difficult as imaginable and from the very beginning, too. Of all the halves in all the Mountaineers games this season, WVU’s 18.8 percent shooting in the first half was the lowest by any team in any half of any game, and 16 points was only better than Western Carolina scoring 12 points in the first half of a Dec. 7 game.

The Mountaineers didn’t score for the first 5:07 and had later scoring spells in the first half of 5:25 and 3:23. At separate times, they missed six, seven and eight straight shots.

The Wildcats weren’t much better, at least at the beginning, as they started 1 for 7 and 3 for 13 before getting loose. They made four straight shots to take a 17-7 lead with 6:46 left in the half, just the seventh game out of 33 that the Mountaineers trailed by double digits.

The half ended with WVU shooting 2 for 15 from 2-point range and 4 for 17 from 3-point range, even though the Mountaineers scored 50 points in the paint in their home win against Kansas State.

“We were settling in the first half,” Ahmad said. “We weren’t getting any penetration. We weren’t getting layups. The second half, we were focused on attacking the basket. Once we got some layups, that opened things for us outside.” Exacerbating matters was the officials calling the final 10 fouls of the half on the Mountaineers. Kansas State was 5 for 10 at the free-throw line while WVU was 0 for 0.

“It’s all right, it happens,” Phillip said. “I mean, it doesn’t happen, but it happened.”

(Aside: Phillip. Again!)

And then there was the 1-3-1. Glorious. From where I sit, I don’t have a lot of faith in Bruce Weber. I’m not sure his players really like him. Huggins outmaneuvered him in the second half.

I had a coach tell me after the game that as good as the Mountaineers were defensively in the first half, they were equally bad to start the second half. What amazes me about WVU is that when man-to-man bends, it breaks and often into a state of disrepair. This is why that 1-3-1 is so valuable now.

Anyhow, WVU found what amounted to a rally and scored four unanswered points. That cut a 12-point lead to eight. It happened in two possessions. Sixty-two seconds. And Weber, just 31 seconds from a media timeout, took a 30-second timeout. That felt weird, but maybe Weber did not want to wobble. Maybe he had a quick fix to something.

Huggins replied with the 1-3-1 out of that timeout. Picked his spot nicely. That had to foil whatever Weber designed on the sideline, and sure enough, the Wildcats stood over the 1-3-1 and looked puzzled.

K-State missed 11 of 15 shots to end the game and scored 11 points. Know how we discuss the difficulty of preparing for the press in tournament play? Yeah, drawing WVU gets no easier now.

The end of the game was weird, too. Esa Ahmad was all over the place in a good way, and you could tell his teammates were reveling in it. That definitely helped the Mountaineers believe they had enough to come back from down 12 and make that first half a sidebar and not a story. So Ahmad gets two offensive rebounds to clinch his first career double-double and, of course, goes 1-or-2 at the foul line.

Watch this mess. Watch the players look for someone or something. Watch Weber triple pump on his timeout.

What the heck was that?

Watch any postseason game the rest of the way and check the way teams roll late in a half or a game. They’ll be prudent and pass or dribble the shot clock away and then start a play possession with 10 seconds on the shot clock. The Wildcats were playing the ball in with 10 seconds to go.

Those guys didn’t have a clue what to do for 12 entire minutes, and suddenly they’re going to figure it out on the biggest possession of the season? Call a timeout. Somewhere. Get it before the inbound and set up a way to break the 1-3-1 — like TCU — or the press. Hurry to mid-court and call a timeout. Just don’t do that. The Wildcats wasted as many seconds as they let themselves with, and that wasn’t the end of it.

The 1-3-1 has Carter at the bottom all the time, including on the possession above. The one time K-State figured it out, D.J. Johnson caught a 30-foot pass and scored with one hand. That’s a go-to play here. Huggins knew it and he did something about it.

Check the alignment now.

Carter’s on the wing, which maybe made K-State think it would be man-to-man, and Adrian is at the bottom. He’s not letting one go over his head. Everything goes wrong for the Wildcats.

Johnson and Dean Wade set two empty screens. With Adrian down low, Elijah Macon cheats waaaaaay up and obscures everything, which was excellent, and then Ahmad comes over to build a wall. Keith Kimble watches Kamau Stokes pivot and pick up his foot, what, three times, and Stokes misses.

Then it was over, and what an odd thing that was.