OK, so they’re better now. Take that away from Indiana 75, Butler 59.

They’re better because Cody Zeller the Wonder Kid makes them better, gives them an inside presence that is no small thing when you consider that’s where Big Ten teams of an aspiring sort cash their paychecks.

They’re better because the roster is no longer coming to Tom Crean from Open Gym High School, and the kids he’s been stockpiling for three years have become men, simple maturity making up for a multitude of prior sins.

They’re better because, even if Butler isn’t, you know, that Butler this time around, the Bulldogs still made Indiana play a game it couldn’t have won last year or the year before that or the year before that.

And Indiana won it. Won it going away, and won it by beating Butler at its own game: By getting in the passing lanes and the mugs of shooters, deflecting 74 balls, forcing 21 turnovers and wrecking Butler’s offensive flow as surely as Butler wrecked Indiana’s own.

The whole business was uglier than a three-piece leisure suit at times – Indiana went 10-plus minutes without a field goal – but defense played well isn’t supposed to be Renoir. Even when it produces a thing of beauty.

Sunday was one of those times. And call it something else, too: Something to be taken for what it was worth and no more.

Yes, 6-0 this year looks and feels different than 6-0 a year ago, when the Hoosiers were doing it against Faber College and Whatsamatta U. A head-on collision with reality soon followed – Boston College exposed them like a Confederate fiver – and from then on, Indiana went 6-19, finishing the season with nine straight losses.

The difference this year is Zeller. And eight juniors and seniors, all of whom have lettered at least twice. And all of that has Crean a trifle giddy these days in spite of himself, because no one knows better than he the wages of November giddiness.

“The team is maturing,” he said. “They are developing. They are developing at a really high rate. … I think that the fact that we never relinquished the lead and we continued to defend at a high level and we weren’t making baskets. An immature team doesn’t let that happen. We would have lost it.”

Instead, they won. And Crean was “blown away” by the how they did it, the 74 deflections, the composure and the poise.

And if that is something upon which he will surely build, remember that “build” is still the operative word in Bloomington.

Because, listen, we’re not even out of November yet, and the real measuring sticks lie ahead. Kentucky, to start with.

Then the Big Ten. Then the meat of the Big Ten, deep in January, the place where Crean’s teams have traditionally fallen down and failed to get up, losing 21 of their last 22 games down the stretch the past two seasons.

Yes, Indiana is better. It is.

If the program hasn’t turned the mythical corner, it’s clearly turned the corner before the corner.

And yet …

And yet, come back in, say, the first week of February, after the Big Ten has been beating on Zeller like a timpani for a month of winter nights. Come back to the dog days – a cold, dreary place of Big Mondays and Titanic Tuesdays that separates the real from the make-believe, and reveals things about your basketball team you may or may not wanted revealed.

“They’re very locked in,” Crean said of his team.

Better than being locked out, surely. For now, at least.