Blue's loss: Five points here, five points there IOWA CITY - Ask anyone the difference in Saturday's Michigan-Iowa game, and the response will undoubtedly be the bounce-back second-half efforts of Jacob Jaacks and Dean Oliver, or the defensive intensity of Iowa, which held the Wolverines to just 33 points after halftime. That's missing the obvious difference - five points. After stumbling out to a 12-5 deficit early, the Wolverines settled down and began to work their game plan. Brian Ellerbe has Michigan do a drill called "6-0 Run" over and over again in practice - in which one team has to score three straight baskets without allowing one itself - in hopes of sparking instant offense on the road, in situations like these. And in the first half, the Wolverines responded with two 6-0 runs, helping build a 41-29 lead with 3:33 remaining in the game's first 20 minutes. And if Ellerbe had one chance to call the gods of basketball and end the first half immediately, forego the last 3:33 and bolt to the lockerroom, it's a good bet he would have. Michigan had a 12-point lead on the road and the momentum on its side. That's about as good as one can expect in a hostile environment. But there was no escaping those final three-and-a-half minutes. It was just enough time for Iowa sharpshooter Kyle Galloway - an innocent-looking-but-dangerous, Rob Pelinka-kind-of-guy whose only job is to enter the game, hit a choice 3-pointer or two, and leave as quickly as he arrived - to get loose for a trey. Sure enough, he hit it. The Carver-Hawkeye Arena crowd went wild. The Hawkeyes were alive and well again. Three missed Kevin Gaines free throws down the stretch and an Iowa dunk later, the horn finally sounded. It was difficult to tell who had the seven-point lead - the team slapping hands while running down the tunnel, or the Wolverines. Michigan was up seven. The 12-point advantage had disappeared, nowhere to be found. It was the kind of lead that should have been more than it was, and the Wolverines knew it. Even so, the lead had been trimmed by only five measly points, and they were still up seven. What was there to worry about? It was just five points. In the second half, Michigan's fabled shooting touch - the one that has bailed out the team so many times this season - withered and died. So the Wolverines played by the book and did what they were supposed to. They drove the ball to the hole - the foul trouble of guards Gaines and Jamal Crawford notwithstanding. They got hacked and went to the free throw line. And they blew it. The third-best free-throw shooting team in the Big Ten acted out of character, earning 31 attempts and making just 18. Iowa wasn't spectacular at the line itself, going 23-for-32. But it was enough. The Hawkeyes' extra touch with their free throws gave them a five-point advantage over Michigan, 23 to 18. It shouldn't have been a big deal. It was just five points. Yet in a game like this, those five points were huge. Actually, they turned out to be the difference in the final score - 83-78. Today, Ellerbe and his team will watch the videotape and see themselves making small mistakes, a rebound here and there, or a defensive breakdown - stuff that they'll think cost them the game. Instead, the Wolverines can save themselves quite a bit of time. They can just watch the final 3:33 of the first half, and use the hour and a half they save skipping over the rest of the tape to work on their free throws. - Chris Duprey can be reached via e-mail at cduprey@umich.edu. Chris Duprey Dupe's Scoop Chris Duprey Originally on page 5B in the 1-24-2000 issue of the Daily.