Nebraska football is a religion. On Saturday afternoons in the fall, Memorial Stadium becomes one of the largest cities in Nebraska. The program has five national championships and a fanbase that measures devotion in decades.
Nebraska basketball has been, for most of that same stretch, a running joke.
“Not a mean joke. A gentle one. The kind where you acknowledge the effort while accepting the outcome. They made the tournament. They lost in the first round. They missed the tourna...”
Not a mean joke. A gentle one. The kind where you acknowledge the effort while accepting the outcome. They made the tournament. They lost in the first round. They missed the tournament. They made it again. They lost again. Forty years of this. The last Power Five program without a single NCAA Tournament win. That was not just a stat. That was an identity.
Until now.
When Nebraska finally won, something happened that only March Madness produces. People who had never watched a Nebraska basketball game in their lives cared. Fans who remembered the program from decades of near-misses cried. Social media, which is usually a place where people argue about things that do not matter, briefly became a place where people shared in something that did.
The suffering was the point. That is the part that is hard to explain to people who do not follow sports with this kind of investment. The 40 years of losing did not just make the win sweeter. They made it possible. A program that wins all the time cannot produce this moment. You have to have earned the weight of the drought to feel the full release of the break.
Nebraska basketball was the last Power Five school without a tournament win. Now it is not. That sentence will be in the first paragraph of their Wikipedia page forever.
The longest droughts produce the loudest celebrations. What is the longest your team has made you wait?