Bobby Hurley was keen on his message, emphatic that it get out there through the press. No matter if the question, Hurley was going to push his agenda all the same.

It went like this.

“Is there a sense of urgency on this homestand with just five games left?” a reporter asked.

“I just think where we are now, it’s the last two games, I just hope that the crowd is out in full force tomorrow,” Hurley responded. “Just hope that everyone is knocking down the doors to get into the building tomorrow. That would a perfect scenario for my world if we are just turning people away because everyone just can’t wait to get into Wells Fargo tomorrow at 7 pm.”

The Sun Devil head coach littered his Tuesday press conference with crowd comments, halting his confident strut as he walked out of the ASU media room, turning around and exclaiming, “Do you think I got the point across?” No doubt.

But Hurley’s bat signal to ASU fans for Wednesday’s game against Stanford and Sunday’s game against Cal is backed by the timely premise that the Sun Devils’ final pair of home games have deep importance.

It doesn’t take a bracketologist to realize that ASU is stuck on the NCAA Tournament bubble with five games to play in the regular season. A loss to either Stanford or Cal all but knocks it off that bubble and eliminates it from an at-large bid.

Hurley said, given the time in the year and not because of “some guy’s bracket,” ASU is approaching every game as if it’s a single-elimination matchup, something it’ll run into during the Pac-12 Tournament and beyond.

That’s a tough premise to get behind, though. It’s not like ASU has run through the Pac-12 in the conference’s down year -- heck, its swept just one Pac-12 weekend series (home against Oregon State and Oregon in late January) this season.

If the Devils started Pac-12 play with that mentality, they would have been eliminated before racking up a win.

Last weekend’s game against Utah provided hope for what ASU can be at its best. The Sun Devils put up 98 points in its double-digit win, shooting 54 percent from the field, 45 percent from beyond the arc and, most surprisingly, just under 89 percent at the line.

That’s all fine and well but this has turned into ASU’s M.O. Win a big game and then suffer a letdown. Wins against Georgia, Kansas, Arizona, and Washington were all followed by losses. But, then, most of those losses were followed up with wins.

The rollercoaster season felt like a phase that, eventually, the Sun Devils would grow out of. Surely when they got healthy and some of their newcomers like Rob Edwards and Taeshon Cherry really developed roles they would cruise through the Pac-12, right?

With three weeks left in the regular season, it still hasn’t happened.

“It gets old,” redshirt senior forward Zylan Cheatham said. “That’s something that I’ve been preaching to the guys as a leader like, ‘Man, why does it take us to have this drastic loss or this unbelievable upset for us to turn it up and play the way we know we can play.

“I think we’ve embraced it. We don’t like the feeling of playing bad, losing games that we shouldn’t lose. Going forward that’s just going to be the mentality, just like no regrets.”

ASU has shown a level of up-and-down, the bipolar play that would likely induce most of the country to pick against the Sun Devils if they showed up on brackets in a month.

For now, that’s a big ‘if,’ one that would take a major identity flip in order to turn to reality.

“It’s now or never,” Cheatham said. “Once we get to tournament time, the resilience factor is kind of irrelevant, to be honest. You lose a game, it’s over.”

Cheatham seems extremely confident, noting that “if we do what we’re supposed to do, we’ll get in there.” That’s the thing, though, throughout this season the Sun Devils have rarely done what they’re supposed to do -- they usually do the opposite.

With no real track record of being a consistent team-- aside from winning the MGM Resorts Main Event in November -- it seems tough to fathom that, all the sudden, ASU would turn into one. Cheatham doesn’t see it that way.

“Some of the games we’ve lost haven’t been ideal but you can’t really look at it like that,” Cheatham said. “You’ve just got to pick up your hard hat and get ready for the next matchup. If you continue to look back and (say,) ‘Man, we don’t want to lose any more games.’ You can’t put it like that.

“You’ve got to be sold out, locked in and confident in yourselves and the guys in your locker room that you’re ready to match up with anyone on any given night. And that’s how I feel about it.”

Cheatham, who’s preparing to play in his perhaps last two games at Wells Fargo Arena on Sunday against Cal, noted that he’s been conscious of what ASU needs to do for a tournament berth since the conference season started in January.

Those around Tempe have followed along with Cheatham in tracking the Sun Devils’ March outlook. It turned from a lock to a near-lock, to seemingly a coin flip. Nonetheless, as of now, all parties can likely agree on one thing.

“I’d say it’s imperative that we finish the right way and pretty much go on a streak, Cheatham said. “But you can’t go on a streak if you don’t take care of business one game at a time.”