Not ready for the Football....

Here in Nebraska you can tell when football season is approaching. You start to see red everywhere you go, you start hearing people changing the ringtones on their phone to the Husker fight song, and for me you start to see me get a little depressed.
See my Mother was the biggest and loudest Husker fan on the planet. I mean hell hath no fury like my Mom and her best friend of forty some years watching the game every Saturday and screaming at the screen, and crying when they made the National Championships. Seriously, my Mother was hard core when it came to the Huskers.
There’s an awesome picture of my Mother and I, taken in the fall of 1975, a few months after I was born. Now keep in mind that back in the 70’s, the University was a little behind the times and not quite the marketing machine that it is these days. So long story short, kids clothing in a Husker line didn’t exist. So being the crafty lady with a sewing machine that she was, she MADE me my first Husker sweatshirt.
Through all that my Mother went through in her life, with her stroke, losing her husband to cancer, and so many other little things that would have gotten the rest of the down, she persevered. She never let things get to her and once Fall came around, no matter how bad a week could be….she always had Saturday to look forward to. And she always knew what was going on, from listening to the games on the radio, to watching them on TV, getting pay per views, and my favorite, using her only daughter as a source for information while I was at my first game.
It’s true, they were the dark years in Lincoln, or as some call them the “Callahan years” and when Tim’s family found out that I had never been to a game. Long story short, we had tickets to the Nebraska vs. Texas A&M game. I think it was A& M, anyway…when you listen on the radio you have about a 20 second delay with the Pinnacle Sports Network, knowing that and listening to the radio my cell phone wouldn’t stop ringing. I answered, “Hello?” Mom’s response? “Is it as bad as it sounds? My response “No, Mom, it’s worse…they just ran the option and scored a touchdown.” Mom starting to yell, “They ran the OPTION? THIS IS NEBRASKA, WE INVENTED THE OPTION!” It kept going like this for the rest of the game.
That was the season of 2007, Callahan’s final season as head coach and then the Pellini era began in Nebraska in 2008. Sadly, she didn’t get to see a game on TV that season, but she did listen to a few. When I spoke at her memorial service I made the comment about how both my Mother and her friend Jeanette (who passed away five years prior to my Mother) always said, that if heaven didn’t have Husker Vision, they were coming back. Seeing as I haven’t seen either of them, the view must be spectacular
Three years have passed since I lost my mother. And I guess it’s still a little too hard for me to utter the words, “Go Big Red”.