IOWA CITY — The eyeballs were there for #22. The game belonged to #33.

Iowa raced out to an 18-1 lead and closed out the visiting No. 4 USC Trojans in front of former Hawkeye great Caitlin Clark and a raucous Carver-Hawkeye Arena, 76-69. Iowa has won three consecutive games after slogging through a five-game losing streak, and moves to 15-8 (5-6) on the season.

"What I'm so happy for [the players] about is, they've been staying the course," said head coach Jan Jensen. "They keep coming, and they keep leaning in, and we keep working."

Lucy Olsen led all scorers with 28 points in the win, including 23 in a spirited second-half performance, while All-American guard JuJu Watkins scored 27 in a losing effort for USC.

1. The defense of their lives. Shutout streaks are good on paper, but there's no substitute in college sports for a raucous fan environment; just ask Nebraska football. Iowa basketball leaned on both a capacity crowd and a big-game atmosphere early and often Sunday.

"First when I went out to shoot [pre-game], there were already people in the stadium," said Olsen. "I was like, 'What is this? People aren't supposed to be here yet'." Then when we came out to warm up, it was so loud already. The tipoff, I was like, 'My ears!'"

The visitors displayed a mutual respect for the boisterous crowd, which reached rock-concert levels of sound several times in the win but also made sure to cheer Watkins during intros. Not that the fans' goodwill extended to making USC's job any easier.

"It was really loud in here, so it was hard for us to hear," said Iriafen. "We were trying to be better at communicating, but I think these are great environments for us to play in."

"Obviously, the magnitude of this day isn't lost on us," said USC head coach Lindsay Gottlieb. "I'm really impressed with the atmosphere here, the love for women's basketball, the appreciation for what Caitlin's done, and Coach Bluder."

If there was any concern about Iowa being too revved up for a foe like USC, it lasted about as long as the Carver-Hawkeye Arena crowd needed to blow the roof off the aging edifice. The Hawkeye crowd was ear-piercingly loud from the first basket of the game — a Taylor McCabe three-pointer off a USC turnover — and helped Iowa rush out to early leads of 18-1 and 23-4.

"Part of our game plan was focusing on our defense, and really making sure that JuJu was going to pass to other people and make other people hurt us," said O'Grady. "When she wasn't hitting and nobody was hitting, it gave us all the confidence in the world to start the game."

While USC was doing little right on offense in the first quarter, its defense was starting to lock in, and what was once a nineteen-point lead for the Hawkeyes early in the second quarter evaporated by halftime.

Watkins, who had 18 points in the first half, picked the pocket of freshman guard Aaliyah Guyton and laid the ball in at the buzzer, giving USC a lead heading into the break and deflating the once-nuclear CHA crowd heading into the break.

"Iowa played really well, all credit to them," said Gottlieb. "I'm proud of the fact that we had a disastrous first quarter and battled back to take the lead."

Any dip in enthusiasm was only temporary, though, and when Watkins' shot had trouble falling in the second half (3-9 FG, 0-3 3PT) Iowa's defense helped keep the rest of the USC attack from picking up its superstar's slack.

2. Olsen, O'Grady make it O'Kay. For as dominant as Iowa's first quarter was, the second was equal parts miserable; Iowa shot just 2-for-9 in the stanza, with eight of the team's 17 turnovers for the game.

Enter Olsen, who had just five points and four of the team's 11 turnovers at halftime, part of a longer-term struggle for the senior point guard once hailed as Iowa's post-CC savior. And while that comparison was never fair either, Olsen picked the finest possible time to add some legitimacy to the discussion, scoring 23 in the second half on 8-for-11 shooting and a 7-for-7 showing from the free throw line.

"Before [the second half] started, I went up to [Olsen] and I just said, 'You've gotta know how much I believe in you'," said Jensen. "She's such a great kid, and what's harder to understand from the outside is, when you transfer in as a senior and you're a point guard, you're still very new and you're trying to learn it and run it and there's a lot that happens in your head. And so, you know, she just wants to do so well and she's felt the pressure too."

Olsen's efforts led her to a game-high in scoring — even over Watkins, at 28-27 — and helped pace Iowa back from a deficit that reached six points late in the third quarter.

Olsen's partner in crime in the second half wasn't usual suspect Hannah Stuelke, who finished with 10 points in 20 minutes of foul-plagued action, but backup center Addison O'Grady, who scored 12 of her 13 points in the second half and helped lock down forwards Kiki Iriafen and Rayah Marshall.

"Addi O'Grady, she's got a really difficult job from the outside, right?" said Jensen. "She started, she didn't; we're here, we're there; and she just stayed ready."

O'Grady was on the same page as her head coach.

"If I've learned anything from these four years, it's always being ready when your number's called," said O'Grady. "I'm just gonna go in and do what the team needs at any time. Whenever the coaches decide to put me in, whatever I can do for the team, I'm going to be ready for it. As a senior now, I've taken a bit more of a leadership role, and I can just kind of calm down some of the underclassmen, and really just make a big impact on the game."

In previous seasons, O'Grady would find herself pressed into her biggest minutes against the best bigs the competition had to offer, often in the NCAA Tournament. Now, the former starter has more experience to fall back on — but also more tough performances to overcome.

"It was definitely really cool to see two [elbow jumpers] fall today after, you know, being disappointed by that one miss in Oregon," said O'Grady, who missed a potential game-winning elbow jumper in Eugene during Iowa's slide.

While O'Grady took over the interior late Sunday, Stuelke sat for the entire fourth quarter, though Jensen said her forward was healthy and was being "a selfless teammate" by watching from the bench.

"Hannah had those four fouls, and so we just made that decision to keep going with what felt [right]," said Jensen. "Hannah's terrific, in the sense that she understood [being benched]. First half, Hannah did really, really great, so there's no status to report other than they're really good teammates and they understood the mission."

That mission was clear: let Olsen and O'Grady cook. Iowa's two seniors combined for 23 of Iowa's 25 fourth-quarter points as the vaunted Trojans simply couldn't string together the stops it needed to make a dent down the stretch.

When Iowa gets this from O'Grady — and from her teammates, who helped get the senior center from Aurora, Colorado the ball at the rim or at the elbow with space to shoot — a lot of things look just plain better about the offense, and for a team that keeps finding itself in close games against most of the Big Ten, just plain better is good enough.

3. The statement win this team needed. For as ambitiously as Jensen and Iowa scheduled its non-conference slate, it didn't have quite the resume windfall that most fans would have expected. Iowa State has never lived up to the preseason hype and may not make the tourney, and wins over the likes of Virginia Tech, Drake and UNI are also on the wrong side of the "Quad 1" ledger as Iowa finds itself sweating its tourney resume.

There's no need to parse anything about beating a potential #1 seed like USC, though.

"It really just speaks to the culture of this program, like how fast honestly we're able to rebuild," said O'Grady. "Everyone trusts one another, and we trust our coaches. These past three games really have given us a huge spark. The one today — biggest spark that we could have gotten, in front of 15,000 people and Caitlin and all of our old teammates."

Indeed, little-known guard Caitlin Clark, who had her number retired by Iowa after the game, saw her team play its best basketball since she was terrorizing the parquet, and all the stress of living up to her hype — or not, during the streak — seemed to melt away as Iowa closed the game out with little difficulty.

The same Iowa that couldn't make free throws to save a late lead against Nebraska or Oregon, and made just 10 of 17 free throws by halfway through the third quarter, made its last 11 free throws to help seal the win, including 7-for-7 in the fourth quarter.

"Today was a really nice moment for [the team] because I know when what it looked like from the outside," said Jensen. "Today you saw a lot of the things that I've seen in my locker room and not on the court, and I'm really happy for them."

This was, unquestionably, an upset. The Trojans hadn't lost a Big Ten game yet, came into the game ranked No. 4 and were favored by double digits at tipoff. Maybe this version of USC beats this version of Iowa nine times out of 10. Maybe.

But Iowa just needed to beat the Trojans once, and that's exactly what the Hawkeyes did — and it's exactly what the Hawkeyes needed to see themselves do, too.

"I'm just trying to stay steady, but obviously a top four win is huge," said Jensen. "I'm incredibly proud of them and I intend to build on it. But I do know the youth that we have sometimes, and we count on them a lot. Sometimes you get in those tough stretches, and we've got a lot of tough road games ahead of us, so I'm being cautiously optimistic."

NEXT: Iowa travels to Minnesota (18-5, 6-5) on Thursday, February 6. That game tips off at 7 PM on BTN.