Keeler: When Boise State punched Buffs in the mouth, CU’s Tristan da Silva punched back. Are Florida Gators ready for NCAA Tournament “dawg” fight?

DAYTON, Ohio — In a game with more dead bunnies than Elmer Fudd’s daydreams, Tristan da Silva couldn’t stop hopping. Or popping.

“Tristan’s always been a dawg,” CU’s burly, boisterous center Eddie Lampkin Jr. told me after da Silva’s 20 points powered the Buffs to a gritty 60-53 win over Boise State late Wednesday and into a first-round NCAA Tournament matchup with Florida on Friday afternoon in Indianapolis.

“I was telling him before the game, I’ve been telling him the whole season, I said, ‘Bro, if you kill, nobody in the country can stop us.’”

The Broncos sure as heck couldn’t, although it wasn’t for lack of chutzpah. Boise outscored CU on second-chance points, 19-7, and by a 10-4 count after halftime. The smaller Broncos notched 36 points in the paint, 22 coming in the second half, and piled up19 offensive boards.

In the Big Dance, where shooting becomes mercurial and possessions precious on neutral courts, those are the kind of secondary stats that normally end your season.

Unless, of course, you’ve got da Silva doing his junior Kevin Durant thing all over the floor, the size of the fight in the dawg trumping all those bigger dawgs in the fight.

“I wouldn’t say (he’s) street dirty, but he definitely plays hard,” Buffs freshman Cody Williams said of da Silva. “He’s definitely hard to guard and it’s hard to score on him. He plays on both ends.”

The lithe, 6-foot-9 forward knocked down three treys on the evening, all of them massive, on a night in which the rest of the Buffs went 1 for 9 from beyond the arc and the team shot 43.8% from the floor.

“I feel like I’m at my best when I’m aggressive,” said da Silva, who was 3 for 6 on 3s, including a dagger from the corner that got a slumping, stagnant CU offense to within 49-48 with 4:17 to play.

“Eddie told me before the game, ‘Man, this could be the last one.’ Like, I’ve got to go out there and hoop. So I tried to get myself going early with some shots at the rim.”

And those makes turned out to be precious and few. The Buffs’ senior forward wound up making four out of his five tries from inside the arc. Everybody else on the floor, conversely, connected on just 40.2% on 2-point tries, while Boise missed a whopping 21 layups.

“That,” a relieved KJ Simpson gushed in the Buffs locker room after putting up a double-double of 19 points and 11 boards, “was a March Madness win, right there.”

Sure was. Warts and all. But the Buffs (25-10) wouldn’t be marching on to meet the Gators (24-11) without Simpson driving to the dish late (14 second-half points) and da Silva crashing the paint early (11 first-half points).

The latter brought the dawg throughout, when CU needed it most. The senior even snatched a rare Buffs defensive board with 1:04 left to help preserve a 52-49 lead while the Broncos were scrapping for their tourney lives.

“Obviously, I’m not the strongest out there,” the 220-pound da Silva noted. “But I try to beat people with my quickness, my IQ, (by) being in the right spots, and my length. So I was just trying to whatever we needed to get this done.”