N. Dakota State's win in Wisconsin one to remember

	Redshirt freshman Ben Woodside had 24 points in the Bison's 62-55 win at Wisconsin. AP

Perhaps you saw the score scrawl across the ticker and raised an eyebrow. Perhaps you saw it in Sunday morning's paper and went, "Are you kidding me?" But there are times when a simple score doesn't come close to telling the whole story, and North Dakota State 62, Wisconsin 55 is one of them.

Forget Georgetown over Duke, St. John's over Pittsburgh, or Tennessee over Florida (at least until later in this column). The upset of the weekend, the season, and many, many seasons before that, took place on Saturday in Madison, Wis. Consider:

• Wisconsin reached the NCAA Elite Eight last season; North Dakota State, in the midst of a transition from Division II, isn't even eligible for the Tourney until 2009.

• Wisconsin had won 68 of its previous 71 home games under head coach Bo Ryan, with the losses to Illinois, Wake Forest and Temple. North Dakota State had lost 18 of its past 24 road games, its most recent wins coming against Florida Gulf Coast, Minnesota-Crookston and Southwest Minnesota State.

• Less than 48 hours before facing the No. 3 team in the RPI ratings in front of 17,142 spectators at the Kohl Center, the Bison were in Orem, Utah, facing the No. 303 team, Utah Valley State, in front of an announced crowd of 702. "And that was an exaggeration of great proportions," said North Dakota State coach Tim Miles of the attendance figure. They lost, 67-65 on a last-second tip-in.

• Finally, according to research by Wisconsin-Green Bay's sports information department, the Bison took the court Saturday with the youngest team in the country: 13 freshmen or sophomores, including four redshirt-freshman starters, one junior and one senior.

How??

"We must have repeated 100 times throughout the game, 'Today's our day,'" Miles, 39, recounted by cell phone on Saturday during an eight-hour bus ride back to Fargo. "We felt like we were playing sharp, we knew we had a chance. It just proves that in college basketball, anything can happen on any given day."

Actually, the statistics dispute that notion, particularly for teams playing on the road. With college basketball's tightly packed gyms, manic student sections and clunky travel schedules, homecourt advantage plays a bigger role than in any other major sport. Entering Saturday's games, Big Ten teams had won 90.2 percent of their home games this season. Jeff Sagarin factors in a 3.8-point advantage for home teams in his college basketball computer ratings, higher than he does for the NFL (3.51), NBA (2.98) or college football (2.48).

The Bison, 11-9, were on the last leg of a particularly grueling road trip that started at 6 a.m. last Wednesday, when they left campus to fly to Minneapolis, from which they caught a connecting flight to Salt Lake City. From there, they bused a snowy 40 miles to Orem. Friday began at 5:30 a.m. with a ride back to Salt Lake for another flight to Minneapolis, this time for the connection to Madison. Wake-up on Saturday was at 7 for an 11:15 a.m. tip-off.