Purdue Boilermakers guard Braden Smith (3) celebrates after a play against the Texas Longhorns

SAN JOSE, Calif. — With 0.7 seconds left on the clock and Purdue’s season hanging in the balance, Braden Smith’s missed jumper turned into the most important assist he never recorded. Trey Kaufman-Renn’s tip-in off that ricochet lifted No. 1-seed Purdue past Texas 79-77 on Thursday night, sending the Boilermakers to their second Elite Eight in three years and capping a play that began with Smith’s bold take.

The sequence was a microcosm of Purdue’s senior-driven March: one star creates, another finishes. Smith, Kaufman-Renn and backcourt mate Fletcher Loyer have now combined for 174 of the Boilermakers’ 262 tournament points — 66.4 percent of the offense — while reinforcing the championship promise they made to one another last summer.

“We talked about winning it all since the first day of practice,” Smith said in the post-game crush of cameras, his grin as bright as the final-score light boards overhead. “Tonight was another step.”

Smith’s line against Texas — 12 points, five assists, only two turnovers — was modest by his opening-round standard, when he shredded Queens for 26 points and eight assists to break an NCAA record. Yet his poise against Texas’ ball-pressure kept Purdue’s turnover count at four, the lowest in any Sweet 16 game this decade.

Loyer supplied the fireworks from deep. After canning four threes in each of the first two rounds, he repeated the feat Thursday, accounting for all four of Purdue’s makes on 20 long-range attempts. His 18 points came on 4-of-8 shooting beyond the arc, pushing his tournament averages to 18.6 points per game while shooting 60 percent from three.

Kaufman-Renn, meanwhile, has been a walking double-double threat. The 6-foot-9 forward is posting 21.3 points and at least eight rebounds in every contest, converting 63.6 percent of his looks. His last-second stick-back was his 20th and 21st points of the night, and it arrived precisely how Purdue envisioned when it pledged to ride its seniors.

Supporting stars Oscar Cluff and C.J. Cox have eased the load. Cluff’s 9.3 points and 8.0 rebounds give Purdue second-chance life; Cox is hitting threes at a 75-percent clip through the first two rounds and averaging 10.6 points while hounding elite guards on defense.

The Boilermakers (34-4) will now await the Elite Eight opponent, but inside a jubilant SAP Center it was clear they had already cleared the mental hurdle. Smith leapt into Kaufman-Renn’s arms at the buzzer, the image that will live on program posters — a guard who started the play and a forward who finished it, both seniors, both one win from the Final Four they promised each other in July.