AUSTIN, Texas — The Illinois men’s basketball team specializes in the wacky, the impossible and the inexplicable this season. It stands to reason that Illinois’s first game in a tournament renowned for those very traits might have been the oddest of the year.

One scene stands above the others in the Illini’s second round game against Colorado at the Frank Erwin Center in Austin, Texas — center Nnanna Egwu handed Illinois head coach John Groce his right sneaker during a crucial offensive possession in the second half.

After a scrum for a loose ball on the defensive end, Egwu appeared to be limping up the court well after the other players trotted to the other end of the floor. However, Egwu’s shoe had partially dislodged from his foot, and the 6-foot-11 sophomore was forced to think on one foot. Instincts kicked in for Egwu, who takes pride in mixing it up against other big men, and he quickly removed the shoe and handed to his coach on the sideline.

“I didn’t have enough time and I wanted to go back on offense,” Egwu explained after the game. “I thought the ref was going give me a timeout to put it back on, but he wouldn’t do it, so I kind of handed it off to Coach Groce and played the offensive possession.”

As Groce looked on with the enormous Nike Hyperdunk lowtop sneaker in his hands, Egwu displayed his normal tenacity on the court and posted up, set screens and prepared to grab an offensive rebound. He actually wanted the ball so he could say he scored in a game with only one shoe on.

“I thought I was going to get the ball and make a play,” Egwu said.

If his mind wasn’t fearful of the ball coming his way, it was of someone landing on his unprotected foot. Egwu said that it hurts enough when someone lands on your foot with a shoe on and that he wanted no part of a swollen foot after the game.

Luckily, the possession ended in a media timeout and Egwu retrieved his shoe before helping Illinois in a 57-49 win over Colorado. Egwu wasn’t the only player to lose his shoe, either; Colorado’s Askia Booker also lost a shoe at one point, and Spencer Dinwiddie switched out his shoes for a different pair at halftime.

The win didn’t exactly go according to a familiar script. A first half that Groce described as one of the most complete halves the Illini have played all year gave them a 16-point halftime lead. But the lead evaporated once Illinois failed to score a field goal for the first ten minutes of the second half as Colorado mounted a 23-2 run.

An improbable — but somewhat characteristic of these cardiac Illini — 16-2 run by Illinois to close the game secured the victory, despite just three made field goals for the Illini in the second half.

The absurdity of the game in context with Illinois’s entire rollercoaster season wasn’t lost on Groce, who found the game’s strange feel to be “only fitting.”

But now two-seeded Miami awaits, and Illinois will need its shoes to fit a little better if it wants to establish itself as one of this tournament’s true Cinderella stories.

Thomas can be reached at [email protected] and @ThomasBruch.