With No. 4 Ohio State coming to Bloomington for a historic showdown, Indiana’s coach wants his players focused on the football, not the occasion.

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. (WDRB+WAVE) — The moon landing was just a walk. The Indianapolis 500 is just a drive. And Saturday’s Indiana-Ohio State game, according to Curt Cignetti, is just a football game.

Well, sure.

There are football games, and then there are football games that tell you how far a program has traveled. Saturday’s is the latter, and Cignetti knows that with Ohio State heading to Bloomington.

The Buckeyes are coming in ranked No. 4 in the country. Indiana is No. 5. The Hoosiers are defending national champions. They’ve won 22 consecutive games. One more would match the 23-game run Ohio State put together across the 2014 and 2015 seasons.

It’s the biggest game in Bloomington, perhaps ever.

Once upon a time, Indiana fans circled Ohio State on the schedule like you would a looming root canal.

Now they circle it because they believe they can win. They did it last December, 13-10 in the Big Ten championship game in Indianapolis. What they haven’t done since 1988 is beat the Buckeyes in Bloomington. That day, Anthony Thompson scored four touchdowns in a 41-7 rout.

Some Indiana fans have been waiting 38 years for an encore.

And the man responsible for this astonishing change of circumstances stood before reporters Monday and seemed determined to treat the whole thing as business as usual.

“It’s just a football game,” Cignetti said. “But I’m glad it’s at home.”

That is Cignetti in two sentences. One part coldeyed football pragmatist. One part man who understands perfectly well what he’s built.

He knows what’s coming. He knows what Ohio State represents. He called the Buckeyes one of the strongest brands in American sports, praised Ryan Day and his staff, and described receiver Jeremiah Smith with the kind of language Cignetti rarely spends on opposing players.

“He’s a freak,” Cignetti said.

He wasn’t trying to diminish Ohio State. He was trying to diminish the occasion.

Coaches have been telling players to treat big games like ordinary games since somebody first inflated a football. It means more coming from Cignetti, because he has spent the past two-plus seasons eliminating the reasons Indiana used to lose them.

The Hoosiers no longer need a perfect storm, six turnovers and a missed field goal to beat a national power. They expect to compete with one.

That doesn’t mean they’re guaranteed to win Saturday.

It means the outcome will be decided by football, not by the weight of Indiana’s history.

And Cignetti spent much of Monday reminding everyone that his team still has plenty of football to fix. Indiana ran only 16 offensive plays in the first half at Nebraska. It struggled to get off the field defensively. It converted one third down in 10 attempts.

“We didn’t play well really in any of the three phases in the first half,” he said.

The Hoosiers won anyway, rallying from 11 points down in the final 11 minutes to escape Lincoln with a 20-17 victory. There’s a lesson in that, too.

Championship teams don’t always look like championship teams. Indiana needed a last-minute drive and an improbable Omar Cooper touchdown catch to survive Penn State last November. Sometimes champions look like a team that can’t get a first down, can’t get off a block and can’t hear itself think.

Then they find a way.

Cignetti is now 7-0 in one-possession games at Indiana and 12-1 in them in FBS. Asked Monday to explain his success in close games, he passed on the chance to reveal the secrets of coaching.

“If I had a big secret I wouldn’t tell everyone,” he said.

But elsewhere in the news conference, discussing the development of a young offensive lineman, he offered something closer to the Cignetti gospel.

“Repetition is the mother of learning.”

Not magic. Not destiny. Not the ghosts of Indiana football past. Repetitions.

Saturday will bring the television cameras, the enormous crowd, the national attention and all the historical implications anyone could possibly want.

Indiana fans will enjoy every bit of it. They’ve earned that right after generations of Saturdays when the biggest question was whether the game would still be competitive at halftime.

But Cignetti has a different responsibility. His job is to make sure his players see Jeremiah Smith, not the Ohio State mystique. To make sure they see a third-and-4, not 22 consecutive victories.

He was asked Monday if he thought much about the winning streak.

“No,” he said. “Both teams are going in in my mind 0-0.”

Everything else, he said, is “noise and clutter.”

Which is easy to say when you’ve won 22 in a row. And considerably harder to practice when the whole football world is descending on your campus.

There is something wonderfully upside down about all of this. For decades, Indiana football tried to convince people its games mattered. Now its coach is trying to convince his players that one of the biggest games in school history is just another game.

He’s made Indiana football so important that he has to remind his players not to treat it that way.

It’s just a football game.

What a remarkable thing for an Indiana football coach to be able to say.

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CRAWFORD | With Ohio State looming, Curt Cignetti has made the remarkable ordinary at Indiana