FORTUNATELY, THE WEATHER COOPERATED.

Game Day in Lincoln, Nebraska, has long been a thing, and it used to be a bigger thing when Nebraska lined up against Kansas or Oklahoma or Colorado when regional rivalries involved the same conference.  Rutgers or Oregon in, maybe not the same thing.

The largest crowd ever recorded at their stadium, though, was to watch women play volleyball.  Stadium announcer Paul Sunderland said what happened was a Big ****in' Deal.

“That match in Memorial Stadium in Lincoln, Nebraska, has to go down as one of the seismic, most important events in the history of the sport, not only in the United States, but in the world.

“It not only was remarkable, but it was beautifully executed and produced by the folks at the University of Nebraska. That was an ode to the sport of volleyball in the state of Nebraska, a tribute to the Nebraska volleyball program, historically built under Terry Pettit. That tradition of success has been continued by John Cook, and I venture to say that only in Nebraska could this marker of 92,003 have been put down.”

Kudos, indeed, to Cook’s program for having the courage to dream big with an enterprise that entailed significant risk. After all, the university could have been left with egg on its face if it had rained on August 30.

I saw a lot of comments from die-hard fans noting that the level of play in the Cornhuskers’ lopsided three-set victory over Nebraska-Omaha out of the low-major Summit League wasn’t so hot, and that the event would have been substantially better if Nebraska had played against a ranked opponent.

Hogwash.

This wasn’t about the volleyball. It was about spectacle.

When folks used to go to the circus once a year, did they nitpick that the third dancing bear in Ring 2 was out of step? Did they debate whether the daring trapeze artist might have over-rotated a bit on his quadruple somersault?

The proverbial “squash match” between programs on vastly different competitive planes was ideal in this situation. The point was to send the crowd home happy with a victory by women in red, and satisfied that they had been part of a shared communal fan experience that turned out to be a really big deal.

The bulk of the folks in the stands were there not for the steak, but the sizzle. The lure was setting a world record while perhaps witnessing a women’s college volleyball match for the first time. The Cornhuskers found a way to satisfy casuals in an environment of fractured mainstream media that makes cultivating them more difficult than ever.

As far as I know, no trapeze artist has ever executed a quadruple somersault, except into the net: the triple to a catch is hard enough. But I digress.  A non-conference match with sufficient rooting interest from the visiting team might be promotion enough.

What's more interesting is the back story behind the event.

The impetus for this whole production? A rivalry, of course. Last September, nearly 500 miles away in Madison, Wisconsin, the Badgers -- Nebraska's biggest nemesis and the team that beat it in the 2021 national championship -- moved a match to the Kohl Center and drew a crowd of 16,833, breaking Nebraska's attendance record for a regular-season match.

Of all the things that captivate Nebraska sports fans, it's their attendance records. A few years ago, when the football team's six-decades-long sellout streak was in jeopardy, boosters and corporate sponsors bought unsold tickets to keep the record going. Nebraska volleyball hasn't had to worry about that; eight of the top nine crowds in NCAA volleyball history are matches that have involved the Huskers.

But the Badgers' one-upping the record nagged at Nebraska fans, who sent a flurry of emails to coach John Cook urging him to take his team somewhere to reclaim their record. After the season, he plotted. He initially pondered Pinnacle Bank Arena, Nebraska's basketball venue. It wasn't big enough.

After a couple of conversations, Alberts told Cook there was one place they could go: Memorial Stadium.

Wisconsin? Dear reader, might you wonder if something is off? College volleyball means Long Beach State or Stanford or UCLA or the University of Spoiled Children, doesn't it?

Not lately. Nebraska?  National championship.  Wisconsin?  National championship.  Let's consider a few other recent winners:  Penn State.  Texas.  Kentucky.  The indoor match with the largest attendance?  That was Wisconsin beating Nebraska for the national title in ... Columbus, Ohio.  That was no accident, either.

[Terry] Pettit -- who would leave with one national championship, 21 conference championships, six trips to the final four and 649 wins in 23 seasons -- had built such a powerhouse program that when he made the decision to retire, he was able to convince a successful Division I coach at another university to come to Lincoln as an associate head coach and eventually be his hand-picked successor.

In 1998, Nebraska played Wisconsin for a trip to the national semifinals. Cook, a former [Northwestern] assistant, had lifted the Badgers from a team that conducted preseason tryouts to an up-and-coming powerhouse.

Nebraska won that night, and Pettit and his wife, Anne, went out to dinner with Cook and his wife, Wendy. When Pettit proposed the idea of Cook leaving for Nebraska, he could sense Wendy Cook's apprehension. The job would come with giant expectations, and Cook would have to replace a legend.

Cook couldn't say no.

"I thought this would bring out the best I could be," Cook said, "and I wanted that challenge. I wanted to take it to another level."

Wisconsin's program-building involved a few difficulties. Promising coach Steve Lowe died young, of lung cancer. Wisconsin recruited Pete Waite away from Northern Illinois, and that worked but only up to a point.  Might John Cook and current Wisconsin coach Kelly Sheffield still have a rivalry going?  "Cook's first team went undefeated in 2000 and won a national championship over ... Wisconsin."

Wisconsin's sports information types are noting a team is only as good as its recent record.

Over the last four-plus years, the Wisconsin volleyball team has crafted an unmistakable identity.

The Badgers have won an NCAA title, qualified for three Final Fours, claimed four consecutive Big Ten Conference championships and spent 16 weeks ranked No. 1 in the American Volleyball Coaches’ Association poll.

No other school has played in more Final Fours than UW during that stretch. Winning four straight Big Ten crowns is noteworthy when you know that eight of the 14 conference members earned multiple NCAA tournament berths during that period.

That's eight of the fourteen current conference members, not including UCLA or the University of Spoiled Children, who will be in conference next season.  That Volleyball article with which I opened also notes, "Two big matches with 'casuals’ potential will air on the main ESPN channel this coming week when Nebraska visits Stanford on Tuesday and Louisville entertains Kentucky on Wednesday."

That might be, but there was another contest Wednesday evening, for which rooting interest was more than casual.  It's Marquette's turn to host Wisconsin, and they moved the tilt to the Fiserv Forum, also known for high-level professional basketball and perhaps for a nominating convention, although anything can happen in nine months in politics.  That wasn't on ESPN, although the midwestern Fox Sports carried it, and the outcome was not bad for Badger Nation or the attendance count. "The No. 1 Wisconsin volleyball team continues their win streak with a four-set win, 28-26, 20-25, 26-24, 25-18, over Marquette at Fiserv Forum on Wednesday night. Tonight's match drew a crowd of 17,037, setting a new NCAA record for highest attended women's sporting event in Wisconsin and largest indoor regular season match."  The "indoor" caveat refers to that Lincoln event, the "regular season" to that title tilt in Columbus, won by, ahem, Wisconsin.

I caught a bit of that outdoor game on a Big Ten network replay, and the people whose job it is to fill time while the replay review is going on noted that there might be more outdoor volleyball in our future.  I suspect there are people in Madison looking at the engineering drawings of Camp Randall to see how much temporary seating could be put on the artificial turf around a volleyball court, and if there are secret inquiries from Madison or Milwaukee for use of a frozen tundra, I wouldn't be surprised.  That last isn't as far fetched as it sounds, as there have been Wisconsin football games there on away-week Saturdays.  The last Marquette graduate to play in professional football was George Andrie, and if you remember that name without consulting a search engine, you're either old or pay a lot of attention to the football record books.