Nebraska Men’s Basketball: When the Nadir Has a Wine Cellar
It was midway through the second half, Pinnacle Bank arena as quiet as a standardized testing facility, when I began to Dadsplain to my son what a Nadir is.
He probably didn’t care for Merriam and/or Webster’s definition, and he certainly didn’t care for his Father’s usual blow-hard-iness but he got it from me, anyway. Because it was still, against all odds, more exciting to hear a 35-year-old English major yammer on about definitions than to watch what was occurring two levels below section 312.
na·dir
/ˈnādər,ˈnādir/
noun
the lowest point in the fortunes of a person or organization.
(See, also: Nebraska Men’s Basketball losing by 24. To Northwestern. At Home. In their 12th straight conference L.)
Alright. I added that last part. You probably skimmed the definition, anyway. You don’t need me to explain it to you because it doesn’t take any real advanced analytics to know a nadir on the basketball court when you see one.
It’s watching a group of players giving such a small amount of interest in the game that they might be part of an auto sale.
“Buy now, no interest for the first 40 minutes!”
It’s watching a coaching staff, exhausted and hollow-eyed, throwing their hands up in the air like they’re in a ’90s hip hop video on Yo! MTV Raps.
It’s body language so bad that you can actually smell the tepid, musty odor of no-fucks-left BO.
Being a Nebraska men’s basketball fan has always been about a few key principles to me.
The first one is, unfortunately, similar to being a hipster. It’s kind of nerdy, pretty niche, and sometimes the main reason to identify that way is be unique; So you can say, “I liked these guys before it was cool!”
This indie rock band of a program only blew up one time, had a one-hit wonder of a season in 2013–14 and then immediately devolved into infighting and a wild black tar heroin addiction that imploded the band. There was no follow up album.
The second key principle to being a Nebraska men’s basketball fan is that you have to always have this ember of unwavering, idiotic hope still burning somewhere in the darkest recesses of your fanhood; a kind of tiny flicker of heat and irrationality that enables you to stumble through Barry Collier after Doc Sadler, loss after loss, and to still sit down and click “buy” on the tickets and say to yourself, “Maybe this is it. Maybe this is our year.”
(*Author’s note: The second principle isn’t necessarily unique to Nebraska basketball, but rather general sports fandom. The key difference being that almost always, statistically, you are rewarded for your fandom more often that what Nebraska basketball provides. You would think that, based solely on numerical laws and averages, we would accidentally be good more often than we have been.)
It is why I have the Timehop app dutifully send me tweets from 9 years ago where I sent out Tweets that are like, “Man, sometimes it’s really hard being a Nebraska basketball fan.” and why I also sent out Tweets like this on a random August, 8 years ago.
I remember watching a really weird French(?) movie with my Mom and my Dad (the film nerd), when I was a kid. This tribe from 80,000 years ago had stumbled onto the precious gift of fire, but they didn’t know how to replicate it. It gave them the power of heat and warmth and was a major advantage over other tribes.
They carefully, religiously, tended to the fire to make sure they kept it burning, no matter what, because they they were simply too Neanderthal-adjacent to use their brains and create it on their own, if it ever went out.
The flame, simply put, had to keep burning. Their tribe depended on it. Like I said, it was very weird and very French.
While hiding in a swamp after getting their ass kicked on their home turf, by an inferior opponent (Author’s note: sound familiar?), one of these almost-humans stumbles into a marsh and the flame is submerged. The flame goes out.
They went through all that.
All the blood and effort and weird French nudity — that kind that makes watching with your parents when you’re 11 really weird — and the flame guttered in the muck and simply went out.
We’re in that swamp now.
There’s no lives on the line. There’s no primitive, nude cannibals after us (although, I guess we haven’t played Iowa, lately and you never know) and we won’t die without the flames.
But this season? After all we’ve been through?
That silly, tiny little speck of heat that most Nebraska basketball fans keep tucked away in the midnight corner of their brains like a flame they have to keep burning? The one called hope?
It’s almost out.
