MANSFIELD -Grown men and overgrown men gnawing on beef jerky, turning duffels of clothes into makeshift beds, sleeping through perilous whiteouts, weathering 50 mph winds and braving sub-zero temperatures as they trek 3,000 miles across snowy, icy and often desolate tundra.

The Iditarod? No, but close.

In fact, life on the road in the International Basketball Association can make that Alaskan dog sled marathon seem like a stroll through Kingwood Gardens in July.

Boarding a bus in the dead of winter and heading from north central Ohio for the Dakotas and an ice box called Winnipeg isn't for the weak-willed. It isn't for anybody, really, except those minor league nomads who are chasing -not racing, not in a bus that sometimes inches along on snow-slicked highways -their dream to play in the NBA.

They'll know when they've reached the summit. The $250 in their pockets will be their per diem, not their weekly salary. That $15 will be their tip for the young locker room attendant, not their daily meal allowance. And the standard mode of transportation will be a chartered jet, not a shuttle bus.

''It's a grind,'' says Seth Marshall, a high-scoring guard for the Mansfield Hawks, a first-year expansion team in the IBA, ''but this is a means to an end.''

The long bus rides in the IBA give Marshall's backcourt mate, guard Mike Lloyd, plenty of time to reflect on where he's been, where he is and where he's going -beyond Fargo, Bismarck and Minot, that is.

Lloyd, the IBA's leading scorer at nearly 29 points per game, thinks about winning a national championship his senior season at Dunbar High School in Baltimore. One of his Dunbar teammates, Keith Booth, won a world championship ring last year as a member of the Chicago Bulls.

Lloyd thinks about winning two national scoring titles as a junior college player in Texas. He thinks about landing at Syracuse University and feeding passes to guys like John Wallace, who went on to become an NBA first-round draft pick.

Lloyd thinks about how he screwed up at Syracuse, about how his poor classroom habits cost him his senior season with the Orangemen and probably an easy -at least easier -path into the NBA.

''A lot of times I'll think about high school and junior college,'' says Lloyd, 26. ''Unless I play for an NBA championship, I don't know if it'll ever be that good again.''

He hopes it can be, so he plays on. And rides on, feet dangling in the aisle of the shuttle as he stretches out across two seats, props his pillow against the window and tries to catch up on his sleep.

These Hawks are nocturnal creatures. They sleep all day as the bus travels from one port to the next, awakening to mix business with pleasure at night. It's a formula that has worked for them, evidenced by the league-best 20-7 record they lugged home from their final road trip of the regular season -a 6-game, 10-day, 3,000-mile test of endurance.

''Generally,'' says Marshall, ''the outlook is to stick this out, win (the IBA title), get the championship on your resume and move on.''

Here's a look back at the highlights, low lights and sidelights from the Hawks' recent foray into the IBA wilderness: