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VOLUME 27, ISSUE 2 25 P urdue needed Vincent Edwards to play well last season. But there was one game, above all others, where it was absolutely non-negotiable. Minnesota wasn't a good basketball team a year ago. It won eight games all season, just two of them against Big Ten teams. Nevertheless, The Barn in Minneapolis is no easy to place to play, the sort of venue where when you win, you feel like you've stolen something and gotten away with it, even when the Golden Gophers are bad. And on this night, Purdue was without standout fresh- man Caleb Swanigan, who was nursing a mild injury. Swanigan was obviously a player of profound impor- tance for the Boilermakers, but against this small-ball Minnesota team, smaller might have been better, in some ways at least. That meant an even more prom- inent role for Edwards as he moved from the wing to Swanigan's "power forward" position. In that particular game, Purdue needed everything Edwards could give. It got it, and probably then some. Edwards, Purdue's only true forward that night, played 39 of the game's 40 minutes, a half dozen more than he'd played in any other game last season prior to that one. He scored a game-high 24 points, good for a season-high and just two shy of his career best. He made 8-of-15 shots, including four threes. When he missed threes, the only thing that stopped him was defiant physics; at least two threes went so far down they could have counted for a point-and-a-half before they found their way out. In the absence of his team's premiere rebounder, Ed- wards grabbed eight of them, including three direct put- backs off the offensive glass, simple hustle plays. Edwards opened the game burying threes, then beat the halftime buzzer with one of those putbacks. And after Minnesota began shredding Purdue off the dribble in the second half, pushing the Boilermak- ers' double-digit first-half lead to its breaking point on multiple occasions after halftime, Edwards responded with crucial passes and even more crucial shots, shep- herding Purdue through another potential second-half meltdown on a difficult night, under difficult conditions. When Rapheal Davis blocked the Gophers' potential go- ahead shot, Purdue could exhale, thanks largely to the best, most authoritative performances of Edwards' ca- reer to that point, or any point. He did everything for Purdue on that frigid night in the Twin Cities. And, he did it all on a bum leg, having just bruised his patellar tendon a game earlier at Iowa, an injury that for a moment or two in Carver-Hawkeye Arena looked much, much worse. A few days later, though, in Minnesota, Edwards was Purdue's alpha and played like it, in a moment in which his team needed his absolute best. Months later, as his junior season as a Boilermaker neared, he looked back on that night and what the cir- cumstances brought out of him. His feelings about the best, most influential game of his sophomore season are mixed. "I shouldn't have done it in just that one game," Ed- wards said. "I should have been able to do that at any given time. That is a great example of me needing to get to that level and stay there." That's Edwards' ambition now that he's an upper- classman. Tom Campbell Edwards' biggest contribution might need to be on the defen- sive end as the Boilermakers have to transition to life without stoppers Rapheal Davis and A.J. Hammons.