DAYTON, Ohio — She sat behind the bench, the wife of the Indiana coach, the sister of the coaches of the Super Bowl champion Ravens and NFC champion 49ers, and only at the very end, when Tom Crean’s Hoosiers were seconds away from surviving Temple 58-52 and advancing to the Sweet 16, did the former Joani Harbaugh raise her arms skyward.
“I didn’t watch most of it,” she said. “I just sat in my seat and watched on the big screen.
“It’s a tough two hours, it really is. It’s a really hard two hours, but I have a lot of faith in what Tom does and extreme faith in these boys. Unbelievable.”
She was there yesterday seated next to her 7-year-old daughter Ainsley, and she will be there in Washington when her husband tries to get to his second Final Four, tries to build a proud Indiana program all the way back from the rubble in which he found it when he arrived in Bloomington in 2008.
“There are no words,” Joani Crean said. “No words. We keep playing, that’s all that matters.”
They keep playing because her husband is every bit the coach in basketball that her brothers John and Jim are in football. He felt more relief than joy when it ended, and they hugged.
“We’re proud,” Joani Crean said. “I’m very proud.”
She knew this one wouldn’t be easy. Temple was a No. 9 seed her husband would acknowledge could play with anyone in the meat-grinder Big Ten. A kid from Norristown, Pa., named Khalif Wyatt (31 points) put the Owls on his back and tried to carry them to the Sweet 16.
“I knew they were good,” Joani Crean said. “Tom knew they were good. He was worried, he said [uniform] No. 1 is unbelievable, Wyatt is an incredible player. He was completely worried about this game.”
But here’s what you got from East Region No. 1 seed Indiana when Winning Time arrived: poise under pressure.
Christian Watford made a game-changing block underneath on Andy Lee.
Jordan Hulls, whose grandfather worked under Bobby Knight, ignored a painful shoulder and hit a jumper that cut the Indiana deficit to 52-50. Cody Zeller was a force inside. And when Wyatt needed the ball in his hands, Victor Oladipo was face-guarding him and wouldn’t let him catch it. When Oladipo got the ball in his hands with the chance for a dagger 3 with 15 seconds left, he took the shot and made it.
“The will of these kids is unbelievable,” Joani Crean said.
During one of the last critical timeouts, Tom Crean referenced the Hoosiers’ dramatic comeback from five points down with 52 seconds left in Ann Arbor against Michigan to capture the Big Ten regular-season title.
Crean has studied Bill Belichick, the master of situational football. “We just did this two weeks ago,” Crean told his team.
He had delivered a different message in the halftime locker room. Indiana found itself trailing 29-26, and an emotional Crean demanded more from his Hoosiers.
“We weren’t playing the right way,” Crean said. “We needed to keep the ball moving more offensively.”
Joani Harbaugh was at the Harbowl. Now she is three wins from the last Monday night of the college basketball season at the Georgia Dome.
Her husband didn’t watch Syracuse, Indiana’s next opponent, knock out California Saturday night, but he coached plenty against Jim Boeheim and the Orange at Marquette.
“Extremely long and aggressive,” Crean said. “You can’t settle against that zone. … And they’re a high-level, very talented offensive team. It’s great that we’ve gone against so many great teams this year, because they’ll be as long and athletic as any of ’em.”
Joani and Ainsley Crean walked by, and Tom, ready for the bus, was asked what his wife said to him minutes earlier.
“She was nervous that [the season] was over,” Crean said and smiled. “She was nervous with a couple of minutes to go that this was it.”
Nerve-wracking?
“Yeah,” Crean said. “I said, ‘I never felt that way.’ ”
steve.serby@nypost.com