If you’re a voter in the Associated Press weekly basketball poll, you might be dealing with a case of whiplash this week. Usually the assignment tends to be somewhat linear, as in nothing that leaps out as extraordinary.

But Gonzaga shredded that routine last week, leaving voters to throw up their hands. The Zags, 12th-ranked entering the Players Era Festival in Las Vegas, upended eighth-rated Alabama by 10 points, enhancing the notion that they’re one of those teams that could win it all this year.

Two nights later, they got annihilated by Michigan, 101-61. Verbs like “embarrassed” and “humiliated” would work just as well.

Turned out, the Zags were treated with respect in that wake. The AP voters moved them up a spot to 11th, which has to be the first time in history a team improved after a 40-point loss. The Athletic even has them at No. 8, down from No. 5. C.J. Moore, writing in that publication, noted Gonzaga went 1 for 15 on catch-and-shoot threes, “many of them wide-open. While the score differential was concerning, I’m not writing Gonzaga off because of one nightmare game.”

But this one’s going to leave a mark.

Mentions of Michigan going forward are going to recall the night the Wolverines handed Mark Few the worst loss of his coaching career. They’re going to cite how hopelessly overwhelmed Gonzaga was. Or -- Zag slant here -- if GU finds a way to atone for its transgressions on that night in Sin City, that game will be fingered as the impetus that turned it around.

The game reinforced my belief that there’s no title harder to win in team sports than in NCAA men’s basketball. Unless you’re a true blueblood and can assemble a roster like Kentucky in 1996 or 2012, and be so far beyond the field, it’s devilishly difficult. If you buy into the idea that Gonzaga could win it this year – and after the Wolverine debacle, that’s a matter of debate – well, there’s suddenly a team out there that just schooled the Zags by 40 that might beg to differ. (Among others.)

Think the 2021 NCAA title game against Baylor was bad for the Zags? It was, but that was a nine-point game with 14 minutes left. National champ UConn, in the regional final of 2023, when it beat Gonzaga, 82-54? That was a seven-point game at halftime before GU’s wheels fell off.

Rare is the night when the losing team musters nothing resembling a run, but this was that night. Gonzaga trailed by 24 at half and it got steadily worse. There seemed to be no competitive instinct within the Zags, and if I were Few, their longtime coach, that would leave me flummoxed. “I don’t think we competed once we got punched in the mouth to start the game,” Few said.

Everybody can have a bad night, right? But who has a bad enough night to lose a game by 40 when it’s a slight favorite?

Here’s what also would concern me: The absence of a counter. Just as Graham Ike seemed to have no response to a big Michigan front line – in 17 minutes in which he missed all nine field-goal attempts and had no rebounds – the Zags’ gaudy history also includes games when they demonstrated no means of mitigating damage. Should that ’23 team have lost to UConn by 28 points? No. Should this one lose to Michigan by 40? Never.

I’m reminded that in December of 2009, the Zags went to New York with an NCAA-tournament team (well, what other kind is there at Gonzaga?) and met a Duke squad that would win it all four months later. Duke won, 76-41, in a game in which Gonzaga had 30 points inside the final six minutes. That night, Few and assistant coach Ray Giacoletti roamed the streets of New York in a snowstorm, wondering what in the world to do with that team.

Sixteen years later, Giacoletti is selling real estate and there was no snowstorm in Las Vegas for Few to channel solutions.

The flip side, of course, is that the game – brutal as it was, stirring unsettling questions -- need not be fatal to Gonzaga’s aspirations. In the first NET rankings released this week, the Zags are No. 5. They’re also fifth in the KenPom metrics.

They have Kentucky Friday night and UCLA the week after, and Oregon the week after that, all dates when they can prove Michigan was a one-off, all opportunities to burnish a resume. Until then, I’d recommend burning some videotape.