EAST LANSING, Mich. – Northwestern guard Craig Moore missed everything on his first 3-point attempt against Michigan State on Saturday, eliciting chants of “Airball!” from the Izzone, the Spartans’ cheering section, every time he touched the ball.

Before long, these chants turned into pained cries of “Who’s guarding him?”

Moore was electric for the Wildcats in their 70-55 loss at the Breslin Center. He found cutting teammates for easy layups, had his hands in the passing lanes and drew offensive fouls.

He knocked down jumper after jumper to keep the Cats in the game. After airballing his first attempt, Moore hit seven of his next eight, and finished with 21 points.

The Izzone’s taunting, which even broached the subject of Moore’s purple shoes, didn’t get the junior guard down. It fired him up.

“It gets you going,” Moore said. “If that’s not fun to you, then you shouldn’t be playing basketball.”

There was a time when Moore responded differently to the daunting force of the Izzone. Last January in East Lansing, Moore scored three points and took only four shots in 26 minutes, becoming a non-factor in the Cats’ 66-45 loss.

This year, he matched Spartans’ guard Drew Neitzel, one of the best guards in the conference, point for point and assist for assist.

“The first couple of years when things went bad, you could see it in his body language, and he could be a little bit of a whiner,” NU coach Bill Carmody said.

“He’s matured. He’s grown up, and that’s great.”

Moore is not alone in this maturation. While the final scores might not indicate close contests, the Cats have found ways to stay with No. 11 Michigan State and No. 14 Indiana on consecutive weeks on the road.

There were signs of individual and team growth all over the court against the Spartans, an encouraging sign for a squad that is losing only two players to graduation after this season.

Sophomore guard Jeremy Nash, all 6-foot-4 of him, pulled down 10 rebounds, a lot of them from sheer effort in the paint.

Sophomore forward Kevin Coble, the Cats’ most consistent scorer, tried to take the game over at times. This is something a top scorer should do, even if it didn’t turn out that well against the Spartans (Coble shot 6 of 17).

Sophomore forward Jeff Ryan worked both ends of the Princeton Offense, cutting and finding cutters.

Unfortunately for NU, brownie points don’t count for much in the Big Ten, and a growing team is still no match for a team that is built for a March Madness run.

Just like against Indiana, the Cats couldn’t keep playing above their heads for the whole game.

After getting within one point of Michigan State in the second half, NU just stopped scoring. The Cats didn’t make a field goal for the last 8:44, a span in which they scored only five points.

Even Moore missed his last three shots, including another airball that got the Izzone on him again at the end of the game, an impressive bit of parallelism.

“We took some questionable shots, including myself,” Moore said. “We took a couple of shots maybe we shouldn’t have taken.”

As legitimate as the Cats looked Saturday, the reality is they still don’t have a conference win. At this point in the season, they can only hope to grow fast enough to steal a win or two to build on for next year.