After the game, no one could explain it. Northwestern head coach Bill Carmody didn’t know what exactly had happened. Purdue’s Willie Deane could only guess. And all Boilermakers head coach Gene Keady could say was, “Thank you very much.”

So it remained a mystery. Why would NU senior point guard Collier Drayton commit a foul 50 feet away from the basket and put Deane, one of Purdue’s best free-throw shooters, on the line with the game tied at 61 and only 25 seconds remaining? Drayton declined to comment after the game, but Carmody indicated that the senior had lost track of the exact game situation.

Had Drayton’s miscue been the only late gaffe for the Cats, NU might have been able to stop the bleeding. But the poorly timed foul wasn’t the only play that hurt NU’s chances to pull off a win at Mackey Arena on Wednesday night.

In the final 1:15 of the contest – in addition to Drayton’s foul – the Cats threw the ball away out of a trap, which led to a Maynard Lewis three-pointer, and Tavaras Hardy missed an easy layup that would have knotted the game at 63 and most likely sent it into overtime.

And so the game went down as another close loss that should have been an NU win. If you’ve followed the Cats at all, you know close losses have been the theme of this season. Two early nonconference losses to East Carolina and Fordham hurt. It was also tough to swallow NU’s inability to pull out a home win against Ohio State on a night when the Buckeyes scored just 55 points.

But this loss, more than any other for the Cats, has the potential to leave scars, given what a victory could have meant to this team.

With a win Wednesday night, the Cats would have evened their conference record at 3-3 and won three conference games in a row – something no NU team has accomplished since the 1975-76 season.

But more importantly for a team still defining itself, Wednesday’s game was about legitimacy. The Cats are still trying to ditch the image of the program that just two seasons ago couldn’t win a single Big Ten game.

The Cats have had trouble stringing together consistent 40-minute efforts this season, and so far it’s cost them in close games, canceling out much of their progress.

There were times Wednesday night when NU ran the Princeton offense as well as any Tigers team ever did. The Cats got a number of easy layups off slashes and back cuts to the basket.

Juniors Winston Blake and Aaron Jennings – yes, 6-foot-11 Aaron Jennings – were deadly from beyond the arc, shooting a combined 6-for-10 from three-point land and constantly hitting big shots to keep NU in the game.

The Cats shot a stunning 56.1 percent from the floor, including 66.7 percent in the second half.

But NU repeatedly dug itself into a hole by giving up big runs to Purdue and allowing Boilermakers senior Rodney Smith to hit a huge three-pointer just before the end of the first half.

After the game, a sullen, soft-spoken Carmody said his team has “got to be tough” in clutch situations.

Unfortunately for NU, the team’s mistakes ruined one of its best performances of the season.

What remains to be seen is how long it will take the wound to heal.