Yesterday, there was the familiar sight of a man bicycling down Hoover Street with a sign around his neck reading, “I need tickets.”

For the first time all season, Ann Arbor felt alive for Michigan men’s basketball when the Wolverines faced off against No. 3 Kansas on Sunday. It was the second time this season Michigan has played in front of a soldout crowd.

The first time was in the Wolverines’ Big Ten season opener against then-No. 12 Purdue, but that happened during break and the student section seemed to be filled with an older crowd. But against the Jayhawks, the Maize Rage stretched nearly the entire length of the sideline behind both teams benches.

“The fans were great, they’ve come out to pretty much all our games and filled it up ever since Big Ten started,” redshirt freshman center Jordan Morgan said on Sunday. “It’s been great. There’s been tons of energy in the building and it motivates us and it kind of takes the other team out so it’s been really good.”

In Beilein’s previous three seasons, he’s brought in a national powerhouse to compete in Ann Arbor. During the 2007-08 season, the Wolverines lost, 69-54, to then-No. 8 UCLA. But in the past two years, Michigan has pulled off an upset — beating then No. 4 Duke in 2008 and then-No. 15 UConn in 2010.

“It's why a lot of these young men came here," Beilein said of Crisler's atmosphere on Sunday. “Tim Hardaway came here because he attended the Duke game two years ago ... You're not always going to have the second- or third-ranked team coming in here. But I do think the people who came to this game tonight see we walked away with a loss but at the same time, I hope they say, 'I like watching that team. That team's gonna get better.' ”

WOLVERINES' DEFENSE STIFLES JAYHAWKS: Beilein is known for fielding teams that play a strong man-to-man defense, but in last year’s contest with the then-top ranked Jayhawks, the Wolverines played a 1-3-1 zone defense.

“Last year we had success with it when we played them, so we wanted to throw it at them and kept them off balance,” sophomore guard Darius Morris said yesterday. “And the couple of times we did it in the first half, it seemed to slow them down, so we stuck with it in the second half, and we were getting stops.”

The zone defense forced Kansas to commit 16 turnovers, and Michigan capitalized by scoring 14 points off those turnovers.

The defense also held the Kansas offense, which averages 86 points per game, to just 51 points during regulation. The Jayhawk offense is the sixth-highest scoring in the country. But more impressively, Michigan held Kansas to shooting 33 percent from the field, when the Jayhawks normally shoot a nation-best 54 percent.

“We attacked (Michigan’s zone) miserably,” Kansas coach Bill Self said on Sunday. “We worked a lot against a 1-3-1. We attacked it miserably last year and we meant to do some different things and then reverted back. Of course, it doesn’t help when you don’t make shots. That’s about as bad as you can play against a zone I think.”

A STU-DENT ON THE BOARDS: It’s not uncommon to see junior guard Zack Novak fight on the boards. A year after switching from the four-spot to a guard, he’s been a familiar face on the glass — in six games so far this season, he’s grabbed at least seven rebounds.

But junior guard Stu Douglass joined his co-captain this game and grabbed 10 rebounds of his own, five more than his previous career best.

The two combined for half of the team’s boards and both grabbed eight rebounds on the defensive end.

“Douglass and Novak had 21 rebounds between them," Beilein said Sunday. "I mean, they just worked their tails off."