HARTINGTON, Neb. - In Nebraska, it's rarely long before talk turns to football. Been that way for years at the Stop-N-Go on Route 57 in Hartington, where folks grab a 25-cent cup of coffee before settling into a booth to talk, and talk, and talk some more about the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers.
But these days, the Stop-N-Go faithful are not talking so much football because, well, it's just no fun. The Huskers, the pride of this state, a team that seldom loses more than once or twice a year, is suffering its worst season in four decades. Its record: 7-6. The last time Nebraska lost a humiliating six games, John F. Kennedy was president and "Please Mr. Postman" by the Marvelettes was topping the music charts.
So what are the guys in Hartington bantering about?
"You know, we're talking about hunting," said Gary Bowers, 58, who recently retired from the gas company in Hartington, a town of 1,640 in the state's northeast corner. "Or maybe about playing cards."
Across this state, in football-crazed towns large and small, there is an empty feeling that is hard for outsiders to understand. The Huskers are no mere football team. They're a state identity card, an eternal source of bragging rights. They're an outlet for weekend entertainment. They're a pick-me-up and a needed distraction in tough times, as when a drought hits.
In Nebraska, a season without championship football seems like a cruel joke.
"It's a little hard to understand unless you've been here," said Tom Osborne, a Republican congressman from Nebraska and a legend for his 25 years of success coaching the Huskers. "Your personal feelings, your self-esteem gets wrapped up in football. If the team's not doing well, people here don't feel good about anything.
"We kind of resent the stereotype that this is a backwater place and all we understand is football. But it's true we don't have skiing or beaches or any ocean. So there is a tendency, in terms of your recreation, to plan vacations and spend your discretionary dollars around the Nebraska football season."
An unofficial survey of a few towns recently found that, on a given afternoon, one in 10 people wears something - a hat, shirt or jacket - with Husker red and the team symbol, "N."
There are no big-time professional sports teams in Nebraska, no other large university. When the Huskers play at home, 76,000 fans - nearly one in 20 Nebraskans - crowd into Memorial Stadium in Lincoln. For three hours at least, the stadium is the third-largest "city" in the state, after Omaha and Lincoln.
Memorial Stadium has sold out for 255 consecutive home games, a college football record. And no wonder.
Until this year, the Huskers had gone 33 seasons in a row with at least nine victories. They still hold the record for most consecutive bowl game appearances (34 this year). From 1993 to the start of this season, their combined record was a 102-12.
Last season at this time, the Huskers were about to play Miami in the Rose Bowl for the national title. The alumni association chartered six planes - two Boeing 747s among them - and flew 3,000 red-clad fans to Pasadena. All told, 60,000 members of Husker Nation descended on Southern California.
Dick Kuehn, a 63-year-old retired lineman for the power company, was there. Last week, sitting in a well-worn booth at the Stop-N-Go, he fondly reminisced.
"We watched the Nebraska band play at Universal Studios," Kuehn said. "They had cocktails there. You could have martinis, or whatever the hell you wanted. Bloody Marys. I mean, it was fun. Everyone was having fun."
This year, the Huskers will play in the minor Independence Bowl tomorrow in Shreveport, La., against the University of Mississippi. No national title is at stake. The Huskers are not even in college football's top 25.
Kuehn isn't going to Shreveport. Neither, apparently, are many others. The alumni association, a year after flying jumbo jets out of Omaha, had planned to charter a single 126-passenger plane to Shreveport.
The association had sent 10,000 e-mails, urging fans to make the trip despite their unhappiness. They got a grand total of 15 responses. And then they canceled the trip.
Near the stadium in Lincoln, at the Nebraska Bookstore, nobody seems interested in the Independence Bowl T-shirts sitting on a rack. Sales of Husker paraphernalia are down nearly 30 percent this year.
As painful as the season has been for the university town, it seems even more wrenching in Nebraska's far-flung communities, where many people are cheerless and reflective these days, having lost their Saturday afternoon emotional uplift.
Shared identity
It is places like Hartington, a rugged community of farmers and blue-collar workers. This is a bleak-looking area this time of year, where dirt roads blend in with the surrounding brown tundra. People here say their main connection and shared identity with other Nebraska farmers hundreds of miles away is Husker football.
"You put on your Husker red; it makes you no different if you're from Omaha or Lincoln or wherever, if you're a senator or a guy off the street, because you got one common interest," said Gayle Hochstein, who just ended an eight-year tenure as Hartington's mayor.
Hochstein's son Russ is the local celebrity. Every town in Nebraska longs, often for years, for one of their departing high school players to win a spot on the Huskers' roster. Even high school stars are rarely good enough even to warm a Husker bench. But Hartington earned its distinction in 1996, when Russ, a bulky offensive lineman, was recruited to Lincoln.
People would gather to watch the games at places like Tootie's, which served 55-cent Budweisers in honor of Hochstein, who wore No. 55. And they served "red beer" - a concoction of beer and tomato juice.
For one of Hochstein's final games, against Baylor, hundreds of Hartington residents wanted to go to Lincoln to watch. Tickets, of course, were impossible.
Undeterred, one resident hatched an idea: He slyly joined Baylor University's booster club and scored 300 tickets from the visiting team's cache to bring one-fifth of the town to see Hochstein play. (The architect of the plan says Baylor still sends him booster-club mail.)
Gayle Hochstein said he senses a parallel in the approaches people here take to football, and to life.
Struggling town
Like many rural communities, Hartington is fighting to remain alive, trying not to bleed population as it struggles to sustain its downtown strip of banks, barber shops and flower stores and to persuade youngsters to remain once they leave school.
Some wonder how long the plain frontier way of life here can go on. Yet they are determined to resist pressures to change.
Nowadays, football is raising doubts, too. For decades, the Huskers have played a style that matches their way of life: a steady, methodical offense that focuses on running the ball. Outsiders have long called Nebraska's offense a boring machine. Nebraskans have long said such people should lay off and look at the scoreboard.
But now, as Coach Frank Solich has been firing some of his assistants and considering what changes to make, people in Hartington and elsewhere are questioning their brand of football and wondering whether other teams have finally figured out how to neutralize it.
Whether discussing his town, or his team, Gayle Hochstein sounds pretty much the same. He is concerned, loath to change, realistic. "Rural America keeps dwindling a little bit, but we'll do whatever it takes to keep going," the former mayor said.
"Nebraskans have always looked ... to the fourth quarter, and felt we could win any game, because we could just wear 'em down," he said. "But now, these new offenses with more passing are taking over. There's some confidence lost here. And some here feel, maybe we should go more to the air. There is not a lot we are associated with here. Nebraska football - it's the one way people know us."
Some say the Huskers' slump could not have come at a worse time. Areas of Nebraska last summer suffered their worst drought in 27 years. Some farmers are selling off cattle they can't feed and talking about selling off land too.
"Farmers," said Rob Miller, who owns the John Deere dealership in town, "rely on Husker football for their emotional strides, if that makes sense."
Miller is the man who joined Baylor's booster club to score tickets for his Nebraska town. He says he is staying on that mailing list, because it won't be long before the demand for Husker tickets returns.
"My hope is that we had an off-year," Miller said. "Maybe we'll have another. But when we come back, it's gonna feel that much better."