For the first time since donning a Kansas University basketball uniform, Erica Hallman will be able to say she has been there and done that.

Hallman will be participating in a postseason game. The Jayhawks will meet Northern Iowa in a WNIT preliminary-round contest at 7 p.m. Thursday in Allen Fieldhouse.

“In high school, I did it every year,” she said. “This is unfamiliar territory, but one I’m excited about.”

Hallman, a 5-foot-8 senior from suburban Cincinnati, has been a fixture on the fieldhouse floor for four years. She has been a point guard. She has been an off-guard. In either role, she has been one of the most accurate three-point shooters in school history.

At one point this season, Hallman was shooting better than 40 percent from beyond the arc, but that number has tailed to 37.2 percent – still good, but at the same time a barometer of the Jayhawks’ strange season.

KU won its first 12 games – all at home – then struggled against Big 12 Conference foes and staggered to a 16-12 record.

“It’s been a roller-coaster year,” Hallman said. “Now we have to take (the WNIT) as a new season.”

Hallman was the ringleader in the shining moment of the conference season. She scored a career-high 29 points in an 81-71 overtime victory over Missouri on Feb. 25 in Allen Fieldhouse.

Of the 64 teams selected for the NCAA Tournament, Missouri is one of only two teams the Jayhawks defeated. The other was Pepperdine, but the Waves finished with a 14-16 record and earned an NCAA bid strictly because they won the West Coast Conference postseason tournament.

Since that victory over Mizzou, the Jayhawks have suffered back-to-back losses to Kansas State – the first in the regular-season finale, the other four days later in the first round of the Big 12 tournament in Dallas.

“We were kind of frustrated how we played down there,” Hallman said. “We didn’t have a lot of fire for whatever reason, and we didn’t play hard.”

But they didn’t put their uniforms away after that loss in Dallas. Even though they had finished 10th in the Big 12 regular-season standings, the Jayhawks still had a winning overall record, and they remained a viable postseason candidate.

Thus coach Bonnie Henrickson continued to conduct practices.

“We were in a weird place,” Hallman said. “We wondered, ‘Oh, what are we practicing for?’ But I think we got the best out of those three or four days of practice.”

Monday night, Hallman and her teammates gathered to watch the NCAA Tournament selection show. They knew they wouldn’t make that field, but they kept their fingers crossed.

“That show ended about 7 (p.m.), and Bonnie said we should know something in an hour or hour and a half,” Hallman said. “But it was about three hours later before she heard something.”

Henrickson called her players just before 10 p.m., and they engaged in the inevitable cheering, fist-pumping, etc. That euphoria has long since ended, however.

“Now,” Hallman said, “we have to make the best of it.”