Sam Eifling is a Medill senior. He can be reached at [email protected]. |
Even if the Wildcats should knock off Purdue Saturday and solidify their claim to the Big Ten championship, there still will be no better homecoming story than that of Odysseus and his dog, Argos.
After nearly 20 years of Trojan warring and touring the Mediterranean, Odysseus returned to his island home. Argos spied his old master from a heap of mule and ox dung he had flopped on, and as Odysseus approached, the tick-covered dog wagged his tail, pressed back his ears and died.
Excepting only the most prominent among the visiting alumni, no one should expect such an emphatic hello.
Odysseus returned to find his home in turmoil, but the NU football team couldn’t be steering its course any better at the moment. Anyone with a modem or a subscription to Sports Illustrated surely is aware that the Cats right now are crashing through the Big Ten with all the authority of a principal’s glare.
We’re still wondering what 1995 scrapbook this slobbering behemoth crawled out of. Join the ranks of the head-scratchers and enhance that bald spot.
The monster wasn’t sleeping through last year, if linebacker Billy Silva is to be believed. It merely had its heart handed to it in a soggy brown bag by the same Purdue Boilermakers who come to Evanston with visions of a conference title also dancing in their heads.
“It crushed us,” Silva said of NU’s 31-23 loss to then-No. 11 Purdue last year. Perennial Heisman Trophy bridesmaid Drew Brees broke open a 24-23 game with a 99-yard touchdown pass in the fourth quarter, a play that seemed to take an hour to unfold.
The Cats never mounted a comeback. They lost. Then they lost six more Big Ten games.
“I don’t think our team was mentally strong,” Silva continued. “We were susceptible to being crushed.
“The game was definitely in reach last year.”
And maybe this meteoric season wouldn’t seem so miraculous if the Cats hadn’t let that game slip by, hadn’t seen their season slide down the toilet, to borrow a phrase from coach Randy Walker.
It could have been three or four Big Ten wins instead the lone, last-second win against Iowa, a game that just might qualify as the second-greatest Homecoming story ever.
For a young team, that loss, and that play (which is now featured prominently on the CD ROM Purdue distributes to lobby for a Brees Heisman) cast a pall over the rest of the season.
And whatever confidence the 2-1 Cats had built was, as Silva said, crushed.
“Until you perform at a certain level, you’re not confident. I don’t care what you say,” Walker said this week. “You can’t talk the talk without walking that walk. You had to be productive in order to be confident. It doesn’t go vice versa.”
Like last year, the Cats started 2-1, and like last year, their conference opener came on the road against a top-15 opponent.
But unlike last year, NU toughed out a win, this time against Wisconsin.
Then they won their next two Big Ten games.
Now, at the heart of the Big Ten schedule, in a game slathered in postseason intrigue, it’s Brees’ Boilermakers who come calling.
And without resorting to the most overused words of this season, “focus” and “confidence” …
“Coach Walker has said not one word about a Rose Bowl,” receiver Jon Schweighardt said. “All he’s said is Purdue.”
The Purdue game could once again be the turning point in a season already speckled with them.
The journey has been arduous. But if the destination is as sunny as advertised, a brief glimpse surely will be enough for NU fans, young and old, to someday die happy.