AMES − The hope in Ames was that the Iowa State women’s basketball team, which had suffered through a tough stretch at the end of the calendar year, had figured things out during its win over Kansas on Wednesday.

But any momentum the Cyclones picked up from their first Big 12 Conference victory of the season quickly dissipated Sunday when Iowa State suffered another Big 12 loss, falling to Utah 75-67 at Hilton Coliseum Sunday.

Iowa State, one of the favorites to win the league at the start of the season, has lost three of its last four games and fell to 10-6 overall and 1-2 in Big 12 play.

“I thought our kids competed but at the end of the day, sometimes basketball’s really simple and it’s a make-shot, miss-shot game and (Utah) made some tough ones,” said Iowa State coach Bill Fennelly. “We couldn’t make anything.”

Audi Crooks scored 29 points and grabbed eight rebounds for the Cyclones. Emily Ryan added 18 points, five rebounds and six assists for Iowa State. Addy Brown chipped in with 10 points and eight assists.

Those three players helped Iowa State battle back from being down for most of the day. But the Cyclones couldn’t quite finish the job. The Cyclones shot just 25% (5-for-20) from 3-point range and 42% from the field overall.

Eight other players took the court for Iowa State. They combined for just 10 points.

“We can’t expect to win like that, not in this league when there are other teams who have five people that are consistently contributing night in and night out,” Crooks said.

Still, Iowa State was able to stay within striking distance during a game that featured four ties and nine lead changes. Iowa State dug an early hole as the Utes connected on their first seven shots from the field and their first five 3-point attempts.

An 8-0 run gave Utah a 21-10 lead. But Iowa State was able to cut into the deficit. Back-to-back layups by Crooks and Arianna Jackson pulled the Cyclones to within 23-21 in the second quarter. Iowa State briefly took the lead in the third quarter with baskets from Alisa Williams and Brown that put the Cyclones ahead 44-41.

But Utah took control with an 8-0 that put the Utes up 49-44.

“They play the game the right way − skilled, very seasoned, very tough-minded, very well-coached,” Fennelly said.

Utah shot 47% from the field and did most of its damage from 3-point range (13-of-26). After Iowa State tied the score at 58-58 on a pair of free throws from Brown, the Utes hit back-to-back 3-pointers.

The Cyclones cut the lead to two on a layup by Crooks with 47 seconds remaining. Utah’s Ines Vieira responded by connecting on a 3-point shot.

The Cyclones now get ready for a challenging road trip. Iowa State plays at Arizona State on Wednesday and Arizona on Sunday.

Tommy Birch, the Register’s sports enterprise and features reporter, has been working at the newspaper since 2008. He’s the 2018, 2020 and 2023 Iowa Sportswriter of the Year. Reach him at tbirch@dmreg.com or 515-284-8468

Caitlin Clark narrowed down her initial college choices early on but she ultimately chose Iowa over Notre Dame in the end.

Of course, you know the rest of the story. But it would’ve been fascinating to see Clark play for the Fighting Irish and she was close to heading to South Bend.

However, a feeling in her gut told her to play for the Hawkeyes, just a bit closer to home.

“I basically narrowed it down pretty early on,” Clark said on New Heights. “When I was going through my college recruitment,  I wanted to be like in the Midwest, just kind of a homebody, family person. Just wanted to stay fairly close to home. So that narrowed a lot of stuff down. And I visited, like Oregon and Texas and a few other places, and I liked them, but it was just like, I knew it was too far. 

“And then I visited Notre Dame a bunch of times, and I was like, I love Notre Dame, and I like, as a kid, like, you want to go to Notre Dame … It’s like the coolest thing, it’s Notre Dame, it has that tradition. They’ve had so many great players go through there in every single sport. But like, I just knew, like, something I could feel it in my gut, I was, like, I’m not supposed to go there, so I picked Iowa.” 

Legendary women’s basketball coach Muffett McGraw actually retired the year before Clark started college basketball, but there were recruiting interactions. Niele Ivey took over beginning in the 2020-21 season.

“Iowa was really good at women’s basketball before I went there too. Like, made a few sweet sixteens, made the Elite Eight,” Clark said. “Our coach had been there for quite a while, but they hadn’t been to the Final Four since like, 1992 so I wanted to go somewhere that was good, but like, maybe had it been like a blue blood per se, in like, quite a few years, and kind of help them get back to that. 

“And then it was obviously my home state too, and two hours from where I grew up, so perfect distance where, like, your parents can’t show up, but also, like, you can go home … It just kind of all worked out perfect. And obviously I made an okay decision, and it worked out pretty well.”

As the days drew closer to a homecoming at Hilton Coliseum, the memories started flooding back for Iowa State’s 1999-2000 and 2000-01 men’s basketball teams. Group chats were buzzing with activity.

During that two-year run under then-head coach Larry Eustachy, the Cyclones won back-to-back outright Big 12 regular-season championships. They also won a Big 12 Tournament title in 2000 and reached the Elite Eight of the NCAA Tournament.

In 2001, they fell short of matching the previous season, but Eustachy’s team capped an impressive two-year stretch in which the Cyclones compiled a 57-11 overall record and went 27-5 in Big 12 Conference play.

More: 3 takeaways from the Cyclones’ win over Baylor

“This is me trying to think back to 20-25 years ago and I’m being honest, I was just trying to survive each practice,” said Stevie Johnson, who played from 1996-2000 before a lengthy overseas pro career. “It wasn’t until looking back and being able to see that, ‘Hey, this team went further than anybody.’ Now, I can look at it and be like, that was an accomplishment. At the time, I didn’t understand what type of accomplishment it was. I don’t think any of us did.”

More than two decades after their glory days and quite possibly the best two-year run in program history, the 1999-2000 and 2000-01 Iowa State men’s basketball teams were honored at Hilton Coliseum on Saturday during halftime of the No. 3 Cyclones’ win against No. 21 Baylor.

The packed arena was on its feet to applaud and cheer every player and coach after a short video presentation that included highlights of their two-year run.

For some of those former players and coaches, it was their first time back at Hilton Coliseum in years, a place where they won 39 straight games and went unbeaten for two seasons.

Although not every former player was able to make it on Saturday, there was no shortage of excitement among those who could make the reunion at Hilton Coliseum.

“I kind of ran away, I brought my family here and I completely ditched my family to go see and hug my guys because we haven’t seen each other in so long,” said Marcus Jefferson, who was a freshman on the 2000-01 team. “It’s just a camaraderie and the memories that we have from campus to here in Hilton, man, it’s truly a blessing to see all the guys here healthy, looking good and doing well.”

Eustachy was a gruff taskmaster during those years, but players were glad to see him too.

“This was really cool, they like me now,” he joked.

Looking back at Iowa State’s rise to prominence

By reaching the Elite Eight, the 1999-2000 Cyclones accomplished more than any other Iowa State team in the NCAA Tournament.

Although Iowa State was officially credited with a Final Four appearance in 1944, the NCAA Tournament consisted of only eight teams back then. The tournament also played second-fiddle to the NIT, which had plenty of prestige at that time.

The NCAA Tournament didn’t reach 32 teams until 1975, before doubling to a more modern 64-team format in 1985.

However, that Elite Eight run started in a manner that was far from elite.

Iowa State finished 15-15 the previous year, Eustachy’s first season in Ames. The season before that, the Cyclones finished 12-18 in 1997-98, coach Tim Floyd’s last season before becoming an NBA head coach for the Chicago Bulls. As a result, the Cyclones entered that 1999-2000 season with little fanfare.

Iowa State was projected to finish sixth in the conference, according to 1999 Big 12 preseason coaches’ polls.

The Cyclones lost to nearby Drake in a sloppy 48-44 contest in their first game against a Division I opponent.

“Drake wasn’t particularly good and it was a horrible game,” said radio broadcaster Eric Heft, who has covered Cyclones football and men’s basketball for more than four decades. “You’re thinking, oh man, this may be another tough year. But then we started playing well.”

Iowa State took another loss in non-conference play to top-ranked Cincinnati shortly after but competed much better, before it went on a 13-game winning streak.

The success carried into Big 12 play against some of the top coaches and teams around college basketball, with the likes of Roy Williams at Kansas, Eddie Sutton at Oklahoma State, Quin Snyder at Missouri and Kelvin Sampson coaching at Oklahoma.

“Tim Floyd left some really good players — Marcus Fizer, Paul Shirley, Martin Rancik — and he recruited Mike Nurse,” said Eustachy, who coached the Cyclones from 1998-2003, of how they turned it around after a .500 season. “We added two key pieces in Jamaal Tinsley and Kantrail Horton, and we did something that nobody really did, because we played three guards. Everyone was still going with a conventional center.”

What Iowa State relinquished in size, it made up for with toughness and hard-nosed play. Conditioning, discipline, rebounding and defense were played to a level like the Cyclones’ lives depended on it.

The games are a blur to some former players, but they vividly remember the demanding practices, especially the “links” and the five-man weave drills. The links were a set of five baseline-to-baseline sprints that required the entire team to finish five consecutive sprints in under 30 seconds. The entire team − from the swiftest guards to the biggest forwards − had to touch the baseline in unison or they would have to re-do it.

There were days where practices would consist solely of the links and five-man weave for hours.

“The toughest players were going to play for Larry, he’s going to put you in a lot of situations to see if you will break to the point that the game was the easiest thing that could ever come, nothing was ever harder than practice,” Johnson said. “It made the game like a cakewalk. You have to be very tough-minded to play for Larry.”

Fizer was a first-team All-American, Big 12 Player of the Year and fourth overall pick of the 2000 NBA Draft. He averaged 22.8 points per game and was the leading force with a solid cast that also featured another all-conference pick and future NBA point guard in Tinsley. Other Cyclone players often punched above their weight class.

After winning the regular-season title, the Cyclones stormed their way to a Big 12 Tournament championship by beating every team they faced by double figures.

They embraced the underdog role throughout the season, even as they received a 2-seed in the 2000 NCAA Tournament. They fell to eventual national champion Michigan State in a game played at the Detroit Pistons’ arena, the Palace at Auburn Hills. Iowa State finished 32-5, which still stands as the winningest season in program history. The Cyclones won a program-record 14 conference games in the regular season.

“One of the knocks on some of the (ISU coaching icon) Johnny Orr teams was that they would often win at home but they couldn’t win on the road, and I would say that was where we were at our best when 12,000 people were screaming at us at Texas or wherever and we were able to come together under an umbrella of previous experiences,” Shirley said of that two-year stretch. “Practices that were really hard, other games that we had gotten through, we were able to unite under some banner of toughness.”

The following year, they reloaded.

“Expectations were zero, then once we lost Fizer, I think we were probably picked sixth in the league that next year,” Eustachy said. “There was a lot of similarity as far as expectations. They thought once we lost Fizer (to graduation) that was it, but it wasn’t accidental that we started winning when Tinsley showed up and we lost when he left. He was just a unique, unique player. As unique as the players I’ve watched at Iowa State over the years, but he was a unique individual.

“Paul Shirley played in the NBA. Martin (Rancik) could’ve. Kantrail Horton, Mike Nurse − in today’s era, a lot of those guys could have, but that was when you only had 11 guys in the NBA on a team.”

In that 2000-01 season, the Cyclones enjoyed another undefeated run at home. The team defeated Kansas on the road at Allen Fieldhouse for the second straight year, a rare feat. The Cyclones won a Big 12 regular-season title but got bounced out early in the Big 12 Tournament, then became the fourth No. 2 seed to lose to a 15 seed when they were upset by Hampton in the opening round of the NCAA Tournament.

They ended that season with a 25-6 record, including a 13-3 mark in conference play.

“Nobody can tell you who wins the league anymore, but that used to be the big thing,” Eustachy said. “That 2000-01 team was playing as well as anybody in the country midseason. I thought that 25 years later, being recognized for back-to-back championships would be impossible, so I really pushed them. I don’t think I burned them out, but they were awfully tired. Tried to gather them when we lost in the first round of the conference tournament, and then we lost the infamous Hampton game. I think if we’d gotten past the Hampton game, we would have caught our legs again. That was a decision I made, it wasn’t the players’ fault.”

Finding pride in the past, despite heartbreaking finishes

As successful as the 1999-2000 and 2000-01 teams were, their seasons both ended in heartbreaking fashion.

During the 2000 Elite Eight game against Michigan State, the Cyclones held a seven-point lead with less than six minutes left in the game before things started to unravel. The Spartans finished the game on a 23-5 run to win 75-64, in a surge that was marred by fouls and an unfavorable whistle that resulted in Shirley fouling out and Eustachy being ejected in the closing seconds.

The Spartans went on to win the national title. Eustachy and several players, including Johnson, haven’t rewatched that game to this day.

The following year, Iowa State’s promising regular season came to a screeching halt in the postseason, after early exits in the Big 12 and NCAA Tournaments. Hampton held Iowa State scoreless over the final 7:01 of action and came back to win, 58-57. Tarvis Williams hit the game-winning jumper with 6.9 seconds left.

As time has passed, members of those teams as well as outside observers and fans have made peace with those bitter defeats and look back at that two-year run fondly.

“(The 1999-2000 season) was the first time Iowa State won a Big 12 regular-season championship in 56 years, and did it back-to-back,” Heft said. “We haven’t done it since. To put it in perspective, that’s an outlier. It’s unique. I think it can be recreated, but it hasn’t been, despite some really good teams, so I think you have to take your hats off to those guys for what they were able to persevere through.”

In addition to the repeat Big 12 regular-season titles, no Iowa State team has reached an Elite Eight, eclipsed the 30-win mark in a single season, or amassed an .843 win percentage in conference play across a two-year stretch.

They laid the foundation for Cyclone teams after them.

“Those guys did so much for our program,” current Cyclones head coach T.J. Otzelberger said. “The successes they had were tremendous. To win the league back-to-back years, to have the run in the postseason, the consistency at Hilton Coliseum to have two years without losing a game is so impressive. It’s not just a great player or players, but it takes an army of people to do that. It’s coaches, managers, players, from top to bottom, so awesome that we’re able to have those guys back to be able to honor them and show them the respect they deserve for everything that they’ve done for our program and putting us in the position that we’re in now.”

For Eustachy, it was an emotional return to Hilton. His tenure in Ames ended prematurely after photos surfaced in 2003 of the Cyclones coach at college parties at Missouri and Kansas State.

It’s a conversation Eustachy hasn’t shied away from and one that he’s atoned for.

“First of all, I was fired for the right reasons,” he said. “I really felt I embarrassed the crap out of that university.”

Eustachy eventually found his way back into coaching in 2004 at Southern Miss before moving on to Colorado State from 2012-18. He now serves in an advisor role for Boise State. Outside of former coach Fred Hoiberg’s invitation to coach in a 2004 charity benefit game at Hilton Coliseum, Saturday was Eustachy’s only other time back in Ames.

“I’ve been fried hard enough,” Eustachy said, laughing. “I’m 69. We’ve got a place in Florida, and I’m gonna wear my Iowa State stuff the rest of my life.”

Past Cyclones cheer for the future

The Cyclones from 1999-2000 and 2000-01 want to see their records and standards surpassed one day.

Iowa State has come close, reaching the Sweet 16 twice in each of the last three seasons. This year the team appears to be primed for another deep run, as the Cyclones have been fixtures in the top five of the college basketball rankings.

“I’m honored to be a part of one of the best teams in Iowa State history, I really am, but every year, I find myself cheering against us because I want one of these teams that’s been so close to go farther than we did,” Johnson said. “That’s just the love you have for your university. You want to continue to see it get better and better.”

Although inside jokes and some reminiscing emerge in those alumni text threads, most of the chatter has been about the current Cyclones rather than past accomplishments.

You see that game last night?

This team is unreal.

They hope to witness Iowa State reach a Final Four and win it all.

“Records are made to be broken and I don’t think you’re put on this earth to be remembered,” Eustachy said. “I would go to that game and have all my gear on. I’d love it. I would love to see them do it, I really would.”

Eugene Rapay covers Iowa State athletics for the Des Moines Register. Contact Eugene at erapay@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter at @erapay5.