2007 Nebraska Season Memories From an Eight Year Old Boy

Did the pain resonate? Did it stick?

In the summer leading up to the 2007 season, I was only eight years old. I turned nine in October. I don’t remember too much about the pre-season speculation, but I do recall the hype around Arizona State transfer QB Sam Keller. After watching Nebraska crush Nevada, my dad joked with my mom about starting to plan a trip to San Antonio in December for the Big 12 Championship. I don’t have any memories about the Wake Forest game, except for being very nervous about taking on USC the next week.

In the week leading up to the USC game there were so many commercials on TV about College Gameday coming to Lincoln. (Speaking of College Gameday, if anybody has any connections to ESPN it would be greatly appreciated if you could get them in Lincoln while I’m in college, just saying.) Once the USC game was out of reach my parents put me to bed, and all I could think about was destroying Ball State the next week.

Sadly, my dreams never came true considering the final score was 41-40. Brady Hoke and his boys could’ve called some better final plays before their field goal attempt. Heck they might’ve even been able to convert the 4th and 5 with how bad the nickel defense was working against their offense. The next week we played Iowa State, and it wasn’t being aired on TV. My dad had something going on at our church, and my mom basically did laundry the whole game. My eight year old self didn’t have the attention span to listen to the game on the radio and do nothing else, so I played with my dog and tuned in and out to the game. At this point in the season we only had one loss, so I felt pretty good about playing Missouri the next week, but boy was I wrong.