There’s no time to skirt around the fact that the Michigan basketball team is firmly on the NCAA Tournament bubble — and the time has passed for those tired old clichés about “taking it one game at a time” or “not getting ahead of yourself.”

The team’s goal is to make the NCAA Tournament’s field of 65, and, according to fifth-year senior David Merritt, the players and coaches talk about it every day.

It’s about big-picture stuff. Get to 10 Big Ten wins, don’t drop another home game, shake the road-game woes and raise hell in the conference tournament. A short-term focus isn’t going to help anyone now.

That was Merritt’s mentality as he sat at his locker smiling after an impressive win over Minnesota last night.

“The NCAA is always on our mind,” Merritt said. “That’s what we come in every day to work toward. We’re just trying to get there.”

Yes, beating the Golden Gophers was a big win, and yes, it gets Michigan closer to its ultimate goal, but it’s far from enough. With four regular-season games to go (three of which are on the road), the Wolverines need to win at least two — if not three — to stay on the right side of the bubble.

Merritt, one of the emotional leaders on this team, has a mindset that is exactly what Michigan needs right now. If the Wolverines got too high after the big win last night, they could get distracted from their goal.

But there were plenty of positives to be taken from last night’s game against the Golden Gophers.

It took almost two full seasons, but Michigan men’s basketball coach John Beilein’s patented sharp-shooting, turnover-causing, fastbreak-thriving style of play finally seemed to fall into place for 40-straight minutes last night.

And because of the reemergence of Beilein Ball, which has been in hibernation for most of the last month, the Wolverines looked like a team that could not only make the NCAA Tournament but also do some serious damage once they go there.

Everything started with the 3-pointer, one of the characteristic traits of Beilein Ball, and a slew of maize-and-blue players that got hot from behind the arc.

Freshman Zack Novak hit his first three deep balls on his way to a staggering six 3-pointers. Freshman Stu Douglass was feeling it, too. And sophomore Kelvin Grady, who has been struggling to get off the bench recently, added three triples.

We’ve all heard that Beilein’s teams live and die by the 3-pointer. Sure, the Wolverines benefited from hitting a couple shots, but this squad is about more than that.

On defense, Beilein’s 1-3-1 zone scheme emphasizes stringent defense, and causing as many turnovers as possible. The Golden Gophers coughed up the ball 12 times, which led to a ton of easy transition buckets on the other end.

Lay-ins, dunks and touch floaters are a whole lot easier when there are no defenders around.

“I don’t know – it was like that from the start,” Merritt said of Michigan’s dominant play. “We just had a good feeling, like we were going to come out strong. But I think this was the best game we played all season, defensively and offensively.”

Even if the team can’t explain it, the hot shooting and the tough defense are exactly what the team has to have down the stretch to make the tournament:

Every day.

— Reid can be reached at andyreid@umich.edu.