This sounds like moral victory to me, which is supposed to be unacceptable. Maybe they should advertise their transitive win over Northwestern.
They kept it close. But we can’t lose sight of the fact that UST is Marquettes Ball State. I’m not crowning anything at St. Thomas just yet. Warriors were on cruise control and that had as much to do with the tightness of the game than anything St. Thomas did.
If something similar happened to the Gophers, we would not be singing the praises of the opponent, we would be chastising the team and the coach for being terrible or not prepared.
Humanity is fickle. Sports fans are an even more fickle subset.