Connor Essegian rested his hands on the back of his head in disbelief.

Essegian, with 7.2 seconds left in the game against No. 15 Michigan, pulled up a deep, uncontested 3-pointer in transition with Nebraska trailing by 1. Instead of sending Pinnacle Bank Arena into a frenzy, the ball clanked off the front edge of the rim — and Michigan, with Tre Donaldson snagging the rebound, was off to the races in the other direction before Brice Williams was able to commit the intentional foul.

A wide-open Essegian is usually an acceptable choice. He is, statistically, Nebraska’s second-best deep threat behind Sam Hoiberg. But the ball wasn’t falling for him on Monday night. Nor was it falling for anyone whose name isn’t Brice Williams, who had 26 of Nebraska’s 46 points and made nine of the Huskers’ 16 field goals in Monday’s 49-46 loss.

Why not Williams there? The ball was in his hands before he passed it to Essegian.

The Essegian try was the look Nebraska wanted. “You got your best shooter a wide-open 3,” coach Fred Hoiberg deadpanned.

The game, obviously, comes down to more than Essegian’s miss. It comes down to more than the final 2-second possession that resulted in one final miss for Nebraska — a tough, desperation shot from Berke Büyüktuncel as time expired.

Despite the defensive masterclass, it comes down to the collective clunker offensively.

“Just think we had an off night,” Williams said. “Never really got going as a team. I mean, it happens. Some guys just have off nights. It sucks that it all happened at once.”

The offensive metrics are downright ugly.

The last time Nebraska scored fewer than 50 points was in February 2021 in a loss to Wisconsin. The last time Nebraska scored 46 or fewer? It hadn’t happened in the Fred Hoiberg era. Have to go back to the last year of the Tim Miles regime for that (Feb. 2019, 45 points in a home loss to Maryland.)

It’s deeper than that, too.

Nebraska shot 25.8% from the field. If you remove Williams’ metrics, that’s 21.9%. Nebraska shot 21.4% from deep. Without Williams’ buckets, that number drops to 10.5%. At the rim, Nebraska only made three of its nine tries. Without Williams? That metric stands at a paltry 1 of 6.

As Fred Hoiberg said, it was “about as poor of an offensive night as you could possibly have.”

It was a massive missed opportunity. One of just two chances left on the schedule to lock up a Quad 1 win. The last — as of right now — shot at knocking off a ranked opponent.

Nebraska’s defense did its part. Nebraska’s defense had a fundamentally sound game. Limiting this Michigan team to just 49 points? If you believe in moral victories, there’s one right there. Coming into Monday, Michigan averaged 79.7 points a game with the Wolverines’ previous season low coming last week in the loss to Michigan State.

That’s what makes this all the more frustrating for Nebraska. The Huskers bullied their opponent into a shell of themselves and still came up just short.

So what’s the feeling after a game like this? Defeated because only Williams had a standout night offensively? Or validated that your defense showed up and showed out against one of the better teams in the nation?

It’s the latter.

“I told them, ‘I don’t want to see anybody hanging their head for the effort and the energy you guys played with,’” Fred Hoiberg said. “‘I want everybody to walk out of here with your head held high. We’re going to get it right and we’re going to go out and fight like hell on Saturday.’”

So, what now?

Nebraska has three games remaining in the regular season, and the Huskers need to win more of them than they lose. Because, and this is important, there’s a massive logjam on the bubble of the Big Ten Tournament field.

Six teams — Nebraska, Ohio State, Rutgers, Iowa, USC and Minnesota — all have ten losses in league play. The three teams with worse records are Northwestern (5-11), Penn State (5-12) and Washington (4-12).

Because of that, Nebraska hasn’t yet locked up a berth in the Big Ten Tournament. With the league’s expansion, only 14 of the 18 teams in the conference will make the league’s tourney.

And all three of Nebraska’s remaining games are against teams who are also fighting for the postseason.

Nebraska hosts Minnesota (14-13, Big Ten 6-10) on Saturday, before a one-game road trip to Ohio State (15-13, Big Ten 7-10). Senior day against Iowa (15-12, 6-10) is scheduled for March 9.

All of those are winnable games for Nebraska — especially if the Huskers play defense like they did on Monday night. But as last week showed, it’s hard to predict what this team will do.

“There’s not too many games where you’re going to shoot that bad. It’s not too many games where the whole team is gonna be off,” Williams said. “... I mean, we’re still playing for something. It’s not like we have no shot at the conference tournament or the NCAA Tournament. This isn’t the time to fall off the wagon.”