When Saturday morning finally arrives, you wake from a restless sleep, because you’ve never been able to sleep the night before the first game. Yet, your step is light, your senses sharp, your emotions bubbling up and a sense, again this year, of renewal, that whatever happened in the past year, you’re turning the page today and life begins anew again, because it’s time for a new year, a new season. At least that’s the way it is for Nebraskans–for Cornhuskers.
You hurry to the car, even though the game is hours away. Then, the drive. You get into your car at 9 am, anxious to get there and feel Lincoln on game day again. It’s 45 minutes, but seems like an instant. You savor the drive, and it seems to get shorter every year and pass too quickly.
Heading down I-80, past Sapp Brothers, weaving through whatever construction they’ve put in your path this year. You notice how many homes and neighborhoods have sprung up along the early part of the journey, and think back when your buddies in high school needed only to head out to 144th street to find privacy and a place to unwind. The rural country side and landscape now mixes with the signs of Omaha’s maturity, but it still calms you with enough serenity to make you almost involuntarily exhale deeply.
Soon, you cross the Platte River in what seems like no time, signifying that you’re half way there. Time to turn on KFAB, just because that’s what you do and have done for decades before. If it’s too early, then you try the Zone–anything for a Husker Pre-Game show. Then, you hit the familiar “Waverly Curve” where I-80 kisses Highway 6, and you know you’re in the home stretch.
You finally approach Exit 401, and that’s when your pulse starts to quicken. You can feel it again, the adrenaline. Your mind races with all the times you’ve made this drive before, and what you saw when you did….
Tearing down goalposts after conquering the Sooner Jinx in 78, Mike Rozier slashing bowlegged through what seemed like statues in 83. Johnnie Mitchell making fingertip catches on a day in 91 when you couldn’t feel your hands. All those years of Sooner Magic. Conquering Ralphie and All Evil in 1994. Tommie Frazier and LP making you realize that, during all those years when you said “damn it–maybe some year…”-well, that year finally happened with them. You remember crazy Halloween nights of celebration, and dark, cold days of sadness in late November.
You conjure images of your favorite Blackshirts’ strewing wreckage strewn across the astroturf. Rich Glover, George Andrews, Derrie Nelson, Mike Croel and the Peter brothers. You will never forget Eric Crouch bringing you to tears hauling in the pass against OU on a day you thought you might never see again in 2001, and it makes you sad for what happened to Frank Solich. For that day, he was King.
Then recently, after the darkest days and the severing of what seemed like all the things that melded your heart to the program, old friends return–Tom Osborne and Bo Pelini, home, where they should be–where they should always have been, to fix what ailed us, to make coming back home on Labor Day weekend the most special day of the year for you once again.
All those things race through your mind as you watch your speed carefully, the anticipatory shorter breaths as you head down the highway, until–LOOK–there it is, to your left, that huge, gray, sturdy, impenetrable, beautiful facade, with the huge N, telling you that, indeed, you are home again.
In decades past, you’d park in yards or alleys for 5 bucks. Now, you park in parking garages and see the same folks, every year, who welcome you back and take your money. You get out and start walking, almost trotting anxiously, because you want to be on the street feeling the energy that accompanies Cornhusker game day.
You want to see older folks wearing the red hats, and silly overalls, and other things that you swear you’ll never wear, but knowingly laugh to yourself because you’re thinking in the back of your mind, yes, someday you probably will wear those things too. You see the kids running to keep up with dad, and wonder if that’s how you looked that first, magical day that he took you to a Cornhusker football game. You briefly wish that could be you again, if only for a moment.
The traffic cops, the lines at Barry’s, the crowds at Embassy Suites and the breakfast at the old Holiday Inn. The people window shopping or just sight seeing. The smell. The feel. The noise. You see and feel it as it is today, and you can close your eyes, and remember it clearly as it was in 1972 too, when your dad led you to the stadium across the railroad tracks, or in 1978, when you took your first drive down to a game by yourself, or in 1983 at P.O. Pears after another 5 TD win.
And finally, the best part of all, after sharing your favorite beverage with a few friends or with a hundred strangers who today, are your family….the walk. You feel an inexorable need to get to the stadium. It’s like a giant magnet you can no longer avoid an hour before game time, drawing you from whatever establishment or tailgate at which you’ve spent the day. You have to see it. Feel it. Breathe it.
The walk is what you feel in your blood, making you yearn to go back again from Dallas, Kansas City, the west coast or other places of domicile, because they are not truly home. Home is 10th Street, the traffic cops, the mass of red-clad people moving en masse, with a single-minded energy and purpose. It is what you think about on the plane. It is what you’ve missed and waited for all winter, spring and through the dead of summer. And now, an hour before the game, it’s here. It is time.
You try to see and sense almost everything during the walk–the kids hawking programs, the guys selling tickets, old friends running into one another again—but you cannot. You walk further down10th St, and you see the party tent on your right with the same van and satellite dish you’ve seen for 30 years, in the same spot. Somehow, the people look the same as always even though you know most are newer generations of fans, taking over for those no longer able to go. You hear music, car horns and radios blaring the fight song, reminding you that there, indeed, IS No Place Like Nebraska, and you absorb every GO HUSKERS and GO BIG RED.
Your heart skips a beat, or two. You catch yourself smiling and your pace quickening. You get closer until, just ahead on your right, there it is.
Memorial Stadium.
You allow yourself a brief moment, a deep breath, a tingle, even as people fly past you. You’ve waited 8 months for this–you must absorb it, slowly immersing yourself in it as your senses explode with eager anticipation.
As you find your gate to get inside the stadium 45 minutes before the game, as you walk up the stairs and tunnel and get closer, you can see the sun and sky and hear some of the pregame on the field. When you finally get to the top of the ramp, it hits you—THERE IT IS.
You take a long pause and experience what seems like a transfusion of life force. You stare, stoicly, and see everything almost as if for the first time again. The field. The N. The gleaming skyboxes. The colors. The players warming up. You swell with emotion and pride, yet strangely try to hide it, because that’s what Nebraskans do.
And when you’re finally seated with your Runza or Vals, and the Pride of All Nebraska finally bursts onto the field, you let it go…8 months of frustration, waiting, longing, boredom, and you drain—everything–as you soak in Hail Varsity, March Grandioso and There is No Place Like Nebraska like the desert soaks up a cloudburst. At that very moment, nothing else in the world matters except your love affair with all that’s good and right about a fall Saturday in Nebraska.
Life begins again. And then, Sirius starts….
This was written by Harold Hunter at Husker Power Hour. It is something we can all relate to. 
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