If last week’s news of Nebraska trying to dodge Oklahoma was a trial balloon? Bill Moos had himself a Hindenburg.

The story started spreading like a social media oil slick.

Sticky and viscous.

Ubiquitous, as it leaked out into the Sea of Red from the pipeline of information and ink and pixels.

Brett McMurphy, he with the facial hair that can only be described as “sus”, was lobbing the latest mortar fire of a story about the Huskers up-and-over the razor wire of the past few years and directly into the trenches that Nebraska fans have been wallowing in for quite some time now.

He wasn’t the only one saying it, either. It was all over. Sports Illustrated, Fox Sports, the Stephen A. Smith network.

Nebraska, they with the recent winning percentage that could only be described as “similar to Brett McMurphy’s facial hair”, was allegedly trying to duck out of their upcoming game against Oklahoma.

Not just ducking them, either.

Fully retreating. While screaming. And sobbing uncontrollably. And begging them to take anyone but us. While waving white surrender flags so hard that Bill Moos might have torn his rotator cuff.

The thing about waving that flag losers fly? That punt-on-3rd-down rag of defeat-before-we-even-battle? It looks a lot like this:

Which is, essentially, what the past few seasons have amounted to here in Nebraska.

The Nebraska program, once and — perhaps inexplicably at this point — still proud, seems hell-bent on being hell-bound, burrowing to new lows at a wild pace. Every time we think we’ve hit a new cellar, that we’ve reached the most igneous of rock bottoms, the Huskers go full 2008 Brendan Fraser and dig a little deeper:

This isn’t to say that the sky is entirely falling.

Only that we narrowly dodged this particular stratospheric divebomb, by the slimmest of press releases from Bill Moos.

Had he confirmed this full-on attempt at retreat from the Oklahoma Sooners or, worse yet, had we actually penciled in Old Dominion where OU used to be?

Husker fans would be back to dry-humping that panic button that seems to inch closer to us, with every miserable season.

We avoided getting concussed by a piece of cumulonimbus and can perhaps write this off as — what? — a trial balloon by the athletic department?

A way to see if the program could dodge a heavyweight and not be held accountable by a listless fanbase? If it was indeed Moos’ attempt at one, it turned into the Hindenburg nearly the moment it left his hand.

Lord knows we love our balloons in this state, so we would know.

But, this latest in a long line of humiliations, however plausibly deniable it is, is the latest in a long stream of moments when the Huskers continue to limbo under the greasy bar of expectations like they’re that 11-year-old girl on rollerblades who used to be few impossibly small centimeters off the ground in the contest at Skate Zone.

So, we’ll play Oklahoma. And, in all reality, we’ll likely lose.

But, for a program with more Ls than “Illegal Hillbilly”, there’s no way to climb out of this hole without taking some risks.

In the meantime, someone please throw out all the white towels in and around the Nebraska Athletic offices.