Norman, Okla. ? At the University of Texas, it is understood that different roads can lead to national titles.

The football team got there without breaking a sweat in the Big 12 Conference. The baseball team got there last spring without even winning the Big 12, losing all three regular-season games to conference champion Baylor, before beating the Bears twice when it mattered most.

As for the men’s basketball team : hold on a second.

Why are we even discussing national championship prospects for a team that lost to No. 1-ranked Duke by 31 points in December? It’s not like the Longhorns wouldn’t have to worry about going through the Blue Devils in March.

The thing is, though, that the Texas team that came to Lloyd Noble Center on Saturday at 17-2 with a nine-game winning streak and a No. 4 national ranking has been a different team than the one that got chewed up and spit out by Duke.

Special emphasis on “has been” after Saturday night.

The Longhorns, who have turned their season around by playing killer defense, ran into a Sooners team that turned out to be hotter than anyone could have imagined.

Before a national ESPN audience, in front of a fake Napoleon Dynamite, the real Miss America and Dick Vitale (both fake and real simultaneously), the Oklahoma Sooners stated their case as more than just a threat to Texas with an 82-72 victory.

So it turns out that the Big 12 has two teams capable of making a run deep into March.

Either that, or it has none.

The victory lifted Oklahoma to 4-2 in the Big 12, a game behind the Longhorns (5-1) although the rematch, of course, will be in Austin on March 5, and the schedule favors Texas going on to win the league crown.

But we found out Saturday night that, for Texas, this is not going to be like Vince Young’s unbeaten march to glory.

Texas may have been lulled to sleep by the start of Big 12 play. The Longhorns owned conference victories of 25, 20, 34, 19 and 34 again coming into Norman.

Maybe they believed that Oklahoma’s inconsistent perimeter players would be the Sooners’ demise.

They were nothing of the kind. In fact, Michael Neal, Terrell Everett and David Godbold made nearly 60 percent of their shots (19 for 32), and that included eight successful three-pointers. For the night, Oklahoma shot 54.4 percent – a higher figure than Duke nailed in its 97-66 romp past Texas.

“I thought they played really well,” coach Rick Barnes said. “They made shots when we defended them, and then we had some defensive lapses that hurt us, too.”

Texas made big strides after those back-to-back losses to Duke and Tennessee, and guard Daniel Gibson predicted that will happen again.

“This game right here isn’t going to affect our confidence at all,” he said. “We still know we’re one of the best teams in the country. We expect to come out Wednesday against Missouri and show it.”