After the Nebraska men’s basketball team shut down activities in January as positive COVID-19 tests mounted within the program, head coach Fred Hoiberg — who led Iowa State’s men’s basketball team from 2010-15 — called his former in-state rival.

“He said, ‘We’re going to make up the game. We’re all systems go. We’ll get better,” Iowa head coach Fran McCaffery said on a video conference Tuesday.

Hoiberg kept his promise.

Thirty-nine days after the game was originally scheduled to take place, Iowa (18-7 overall, 12-6 Big Ten) and Nebraska (7-17, 3-14) will meet at Carver-Hawkeye Arena at 8 p.m. Thursday.

And the Huskers are playing their best basketball of the season.

Since resuming play on Feb. 6 after a three-week absence from the court, Thursday’s contest will mark Nebraska’s 13th game in a 27-day span.

The Huskers’ Feb. 14 victory over Penn State snapped the team’s 25-game losing streak in conference play. Going into Thursday’s matchup, and for the first time in Hoiberg’s two-year tenure as Nebraska’s head coach (which includes a 5-32 conference record), the team is on a two-game winning streak in the conference.

That includes its previous game against Rutgers, a team likely headed to the NCAA Tournament, where it shot 51.9 percent from the field in a 21-point victory.

Before the end of its Big Ten losing skid, Nebraska’s last win in conference play was last season against Iowa in Lincoln. In that game, Iowa shot 4-of-33 from 3-point range and Nebraska won by six points. The Hawkeyes won the rematch later in the season at Carver by 24 points behind a career-high 30 points from Joe Wieskamp.

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Hoiberg is expecting a performance out of Iowa that more closely resembles that second game.

“We could play great [Thursday] and get beat by 20,” Hoiberg said. “Iowa’s that good. They’re playing that well right now. That game against Ohio State [a 73-57 Hawkeye win in Columbus on Sunday] was as good a performance as I’ve seen all year, in any league.”

The fifth-ranked Hawkeyes are ranked as high as they have been in the first week of March since 1956. And Hoiberg understands why.

Luka Garza is the “best post presence in the game, and it’s not even close,” Hoiberg said Wednesday. Wieskamp is “having an incredible year.” Starting guard CJ Fredrick is “one of the more underrated players in the country,” and freshman forward Keegan Murray “makes so many mature plays.”

“It’s a scary, scary team,” Hoiberg said.

The praise from Hoiberg goes on and on.

But the most impressive accomplishment from this season may be Iowa’s ability to be on the court at all. Whereas Nebraska’s season was halted by positive COVID-19 cases, the Hawkeyes have not been met with the same interruptions.

“It really comes down to the discipline I think that our players showed and a commitment to one another to be safe, do everything we could in terms of making good decisions off the floor so we can show up in practice every day, we can show up and play in all of our games,” McCaffery said.

Fourteen positive cases within Nebraska’s program, including Hoiberg, led to the team’s shutdown. Thursday’s game will be the ninth the Huskers have had to make up, meaning the team will play 19 of its 20 regular season conference games.

Iowa, though, has not had to shut down team activities at any point since the season started and has not been responsible for any postponed games.

Assuming Iowa’s game with Nebraska goes as planned, and then the team plays Wisconsin on Sunday at Carver, the Hawkeyes will have successfully played all of its 27 regular-season games and be one of only five of the Big Ten’s 14 teams to play a full 20-game conference schedule.

And if Iowa wins its final two contests, the team will clinch third place in the Big Ten and a double bye in next week’s conference tournament.

“It’s a testament to the sacrifices we’ve made as a team,” point guard Jordan Bohannon said. “Around October is when we kind of locked everything down. We said we’re going to focus on basketball. We’re not going to go outside, go downtown, go see people, go see our friends, go see our families. We said we’re going to be focused on this team throughout the entire season.

“We sacrificed a lot. We wanted to have it mean something toward the end of the season. I think we’re on pace to do that.”