I just watched perfection, and its name is Gonzaga. 1976 Indiana will have company soon.

INDIANAPOLIS – On a cloudy day just north of downtown, the sun tapped gently on the windows of Hinkle Fieldhouse on Sunday for a look at the most perfect team in college basketball, No. 1 Gonzaga. The sunlight couldn’t get in, and fifth-seeded Creighton was lucky to get out with an 18-point defeat that could have been so much worse than the 83-65 final score suggests.

The top-seeded Zags didn’t play their best game against Creighton, approaching a season high with 16 turnovers, but easily advanced to the Tuesday night's West Region Final against USC or Oregon at Lucas Oil Stadium. With 4:42 left, Gonzaga led by 27.

Gonzaga (29-0) is bidding to become the first undefeated national champion in Division I men’s basketball since IU went 32-0 in 1976 — the Zags would be 32-0, if they do it — and coach Mark Few has constructed a team with no discernible flaws. Creighton is talented, well-coached and deep, with five players averaging in double figures, and its 14 Big East wins were three more than anyone else in league play this season, and the Bluejays started strong behind the first-half heroics of Marcus Zegarowski. Even so, they never led.

Gonzaga's secret weapon:Transfer Andrew Nembhard feeds the ball to teammates

For the rest of the NCAA tournament field, there is a bright side: Gonzaga is cocky and satiated.

Kidding!

“It's been an absolute joy to coach,” Few was saying after his team’s 26th consecutive double-digit victory, “but there will be no more good nights of sleep here in the bubble from here on out. These are all going to be really, really hard games.”

Says Gonzaga guard Andrew Nembhard: “I don't think we’ve peaked. I think we can always get better. I think we're getting close.”

Who is Andrew Nembhard? He’s the “other” Gonzaga starter, the only member of the Zags’ starting five who doesn’t appear in 2021 NBA mock drafts. He’s the one whose name you might not know.

He’s the guy who just had 17 points, eight assists and just one turnover against Creighton, going 7-for-9 from the floor and 3-for-5 on 3-pointers.

He’s also the guy on the receiving end of a play that was so astonishing, it had someone inside Hinkle Fieldhouse shouting: “Oh my God!” Gonzaga was clinging to a five-point lead — it was 7-2 — when one Zags All-American (Drew Timme) grabbed an offensive rebound and passed to another Zags All-American (Jalen Suggs). Suggs dribbled twice to reach midcourt, where he spotted Nembhard behind a handful of Creighton players. Suggs delivered a 40-foot bounce through traffic, into the lane, where Nembhard grabbed it and threw it down.

In the crowd, someone was shouting “oh my God!” That someone was me.

This was my first look at Gonzaga, and like so many first impressions, this one will stick. It’s everything, from the pregame notes you read to the postgame comments you hear to the actual basketball in the middle, when you see with your own eyes just how big Nembhard is — he’s 6-5, and he’s a point guard, and he took that poor little Zegarowski fellow into the lane for a post-game tutorial — and how skilled he is with the ball. Nembhard has an assist-to-turnover ratio of nearly 4-to-1, and if you don’t know what that means, I’ll tell you. In college, a good point guard has a 2-to-1 ratio. A great point guard has a 3-to-1 ratio. What kind of point guard has a 4-to-1 ratio? Don’t know. Never seen that before.

And Nembhard is the Zags’ other starter.

Their best player — their only first-team All-American — is Corey Kispert. He’s a 6-7 wing who leads the team in scoring at 19.2 ppg, and who posted shooting numbers that, like Nembhard’s assist-to-turnover ratio, I’ve never seen before. You’ve heard of the 40-50-90 shooting line, the holy grail for shooters? It’s hitting 40% on 3-pointers, 50% from the floor overall and 90% from the line. It’s hard to do in one game, and almost impossible for a full season. Less than 10 players have done it in the NBA, for example.

Kispert is blowing it away this season: 45.8% on 3-pointers, 54.5% overall from the floor, 90.1% on free throws.

Kispert took just one shot in the first half Sunday. Gonzaga led 43-33 at the half anyway.

It’s scary, this team, with a post player (the 6-10 Timme) who shoots 65.5% from the floor leading an offense that leads the country in points in the paint at 49.5 ppg, the highest total in college basketball in 15 years. The Zags hit that average Sunday, leaving Creighton coach Greg McDermott to marvel like so:

“They had 50 points in the paint on us today,” he was saying, “and that's with us trying to take that part of their game away.”

Timme is surrounded by four 3-point shooters — Joel Ayayi, the only Gonzaga starter I’ve not mentioned yet, made three 3-pointers in a row in the first half — and Few says he’s “the best I've ever coached” at putting the opposing defense in a box on ball screens. Timme has 22 points, six rebounds and four assists on Sunday, including back-to-back kickouts to Ayayi for his first two 3-pointers of the first half.

The Zags lead the country in scoring at 92.1 ppg and field-goal accuracy at 54.9%, and McDermott isn’t sure Gonzaga’s defense gets the credit it deserves.

“This is not a one-trick pony,” McDermott said of the Zags. “These guys can play on both ends of the floor.”

Meanwhile, I’ll remind you of something I wrote earlier, but I slipped it in there, hoping you read right over it. Bet you did. Bet you didn’t notice when I mentioned that Gonzaga has won 26 games in a row by double figures. Just one team has played the Zags within 10 points this season, then-No. 11 West Virginia, and Suggs suffered an ankle injury in the first half of that 87-82 victory that would sideline him for two games.

Nobody’s beating them at full strength. Nobody’s coming close. The Zags blew out Virginia 98-75, and nobody does that to Tony Bennett. Gonzaga did that, and does it to everybody, including Creighton on Sunday, but Mark Few would like to say a few words.

“I hope people realize just how hard it is,” Few said of winning games in the NCAA tournament. “It's literally the hardest thing we do in our sport, advancing in this tournament.”

For whoever plays Gonzaga next, yes.

Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar or at www.facebook.com/gregg.doyel.