INDIANAPOLIS — Minutes after the Iowa men’s basketball team left the court at Lucas Oil Stadium Friday night, thundering “Let’s Go Hawks!” chants still roared as Hawkeye Elvis and the other Hawkeye fans in attendance left the building.

For the first time all season, Hawkeye fans had watched their team play in-person. And Iowa’s play in the second half of its quarterfinals matchup with Wisconsin made it worth the trip.

The No. 3-seed Hawkeyes (21-7 overall, 15-6 Big Ten) held the Badgers (17-12, 11-11) to one basket in the final nine minutes and twenty seconds of the game on their way to a 62-57 victory that completes the 3-0 season sweep against Wisconsin and marks the program’s first trip to the Big Ten Tournament semifinals in 15 years.

“Showing up to Carver [Hawkeye-Arena] and it’s empty… and to walk on the court tonight and see people yelling your name, seeing family there, it was surreal,” point guard Jordan Bohannon said of the limited capacity crowd of 8,000 fans. “It was almost like a dream, thinking about what we’ve been through as a country over the last 12 months… We’ve been waiting for this.”

While the second half and the end result of Iowa’s victory left the team’s fans chanting, the first half likely left them worried about a potentially shortened trip.

Iowa turned the ball over eight times in the first half, and missed all 10 of its 3-point attempts. Defensively, the Hawkeyes allowed the Badgers to convert on 45.2 percent of their first-half shot attempts.

At the half, Iowa trailed by six points.

Whether or not the Hawkeyes would move to 0-5 in Big Ten quarterfinals games under coach Fran McCaffery seemed to be a lingering question throughout the arena.

And Iowa’s second half play answered that question.

The Hawkeyes didn’t turn the ball over in the second half and dropped the Badgers’ shooting percentage by 15 percent compared to the first half. Iowa forced seven of its 14 turnovers in the second half and registered six of its season-high 10 blocked shots — including guard Joe Wieskamp’s emphatic rejection with 20 seconds remaining to seal the victory — in the final 20 minutes of play.

“Unreal win,” Bohannon said. “It was ugly.

“Our offense wasn’t really going. We didn’t score a lot of points tonight. But what we held Wisconsin to shows the grit we have on the defensive end… We were really connected in the second half. And that started with [Wieskamp].”

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Wieskamp let out a yell as he blocked D’Mitrik Trice’s shot attempt. And Hawkeye fans cheered as they watched the junior guard do what they’d hoped he’d be available to do going into the game.

The Muscatine, Iowa, native suffered an ankle injury in Iowa’s regular-season finale on Sunday and was questionable heading into Friday’s contest. The team announced hours before tipoff that Wieskamp would play.

“I got a lot of treatment throughout the week,” Wieskamp said. “I was living in the training room, icing it non-stop. This is what every college athlete dreams of — playing in March, playing in the Big Ten Tournament, playing in the NCAA Tournament. It was going to take a lot to hold me out of this.”

The second-team All-Big Ten performer scored 10 points — including four in the final three minutes of play — and collected seven rebounds against Wisconsin.

“I was really impressed with him,” coach Fran McCaffery said. “… I didn’t see anything at all in his performance that looked like he was a step slow. He was out there competing and having fun.”

Wieskamp said after the game that he felt “great” and will re-evaluate his status Saturday morning.

The Hawkeyes will face No. 2-seed Illinois Saturday at 2:30 p.m. (CT) in the Big Ten semifinals. The game will air on CBS.