Nebraska men’s basketball got its first NCAA Tournament win in March of 2026. The excerpt below is from the new book Sweet Dreams.
By Dirk Chatelain
Flatwater Free Press
This story has been excerpted from Chapter 1 of “Sweet Dreams,” Dirk Chatelain’s new book on the journey behind the Nebraska Cornhuskers’ long-awaited breakthrough season. The book will be released and available in bookstores in early December. Go to huskerbasketball.netlify.app to pre-order your copy.
With 10 seconds left, Pryce Sandfort grabs the rebound and takes off with the dribble. He has envisioned this moment thousands of times. The standing crowd holds its collective breath.
At 7.3, the Big Ten’s best shooter crosses half court along the right sideline. He eyes the clock and wonders how long he should wait to fire the season’s biggest shot. Not yet.
At 6.0, Sandfort turns toward the middle of the floor. But just before he rises to launch, Sandfort spots the flaw in Vanderbilt’s defense. Confused amid the chaos, the Commodores leave an open Husker at the top of the key, shouting his name.
Pryce!
At 5.0, Braden Frager catches Sandfort’s pass and dashes down the open lane. His left-handed layup kisses the glass, rattles around the iron and – with 2.2 seconds left – drops through the net. For a split second, Fred Hoiberg bounces on his toes like a toddler awaiting ice cream.
In a quiet room, Nebraska’s head coach can hear every time his heart beats. Not tonight. The go-ahead basket incites a crowd pop that pierces eardrums, triggers goosebumps and damn near rattles bones. The Huskers huddle in front of their bench as a battlecry thunders through the defending NBA champion’s arena.
“Go Big Red! Go Big Red! Go Big Red!”
To secure the program’s first-ever Sweet 16 and party the night away in Oklahoma City, the Huskers need only prevent a Vanderbilt basket from 94 feet away. That’s why Hoiberg and his coaches keep instructions simple: Don’t foul. Don’t switch. Make them score over you.
The Commodores do not throw the ball deep. They don’t run a fancy play. Vanderbilt star Tyler Tanner, who already has 27 points, catches the inbounds pass in front of Nebraska’s bench, takes one dribble, leaps off his right foot and – with 1.3 seconds left – launches over Sam Hoiberg’s outstretched arm, from 60 feet away. Sam immediately turns from half court and thinks, “Oh sh–, that looks really good.”
As the half-courter hangs in the air at 10:14 p.m. on March 21, 2026, the best story of the college basketball season is about to get even better.
Imagine if someone told you 10 years ago that Nebraska, the only major-conference program in the country never to win an NCAA tournament game, would finally be in this position. The sport’s most notorious underachiever will finally captivate the college basketball world. You might have believed that. Eventually, the program had to catch a break, right? But put yourself in that spot a decade ago and consider the details.
First, Nebraska is going to hire a former NBA head coach in the prime of his career. That’s unexpected, right? NU usually hires a no-name, mid-major coach.
The coach was born in Lincoln, and his grandfather was Nebraska’s head coach, and Tom Osborne once recruited him to play quarterback, and he played against Nebraska eight times in college, and he hung up his NBA jersey only because of a life-threatening heart condition, then learned how to coach and revitalized his alma mater Iowa State before moving on to the Chicago Bulls, where he ran into a nightmare and got fired.
Upon landing in Lincoln to a hero’s welcome, this former NBA coach will record the three worst Husker seasons since 1964. In three consecutive seasons! Over a 25-month span, he’ll go 4-56 against major-conference competition. Whoa, how did that happen?
Then, with his last chance, the coach — one of the game’s best-known offensive gurus — will clean house, start over and turn the program around with defense. His right-hand man, the architect of a unique scheme, was literally born without a left hand. It’s getting stranger.
If Nebraska made the Sweet 16, then everyone must have seen it coming, right? Nope. The Huskers will be picked 14th in the preseason Big Ten poll. The year before, they won’t even qualify for the conference tournament – which would have been very hard to understand 10 years ago.
At this point, younger you is surely scratching the skin off your head. You may have taken all that information and assumed that Nebraska would squeeze into the Big Dance and manufacture a couple upsets. No! The Huskers will start the season 20-0, hold college basketball’s longest win streak and climb into the nation’s Top 5. What!?
But even when you pile all the facts, even when you account for the potential once-a-millennium alignment of the stars, it doesn’t capture the shock value. Because 10 years ago, based on Coach’s track record, you might have assumed that Nebraska achieved its signature season with a bunch of NBA draft picks – or one transcendent player. Wrong. Coach will construct the island of misfit toys.
His quarterback, in his seventh year of college, will be a 6-foot-10 Dutchman recovering from a career-threatening knee injury. He’ll owe his landmark season at Nebraska to a rare cartilage transplant from a cadaver. Yikes.
The best shooter will grow up idolizing Coach and rooting for the Huskers, but he’ll actually choose Coach’s arch rival. The year before NU’s Sweet 16 run, this 6-foot-7 flamethrower will end Nebraska’s regular season. Ouch.
His best post defender will be a goofball from Turkey. His most clutch guard, the author of the season’s most jaw-dropping shot, will start his career in Lincoln, then transfer to Rhode Island, then come back to Nebraska. Is that legal?
His best bench players, both in-state lefties, couldn’t be more different. One, a high flyer with supreme confidence, will slide under the college basketball radar because he’ll skip his senior year of high school and enroll early. The other, a crafty coach on the floor, will plan to transfer to a lower level after the previous season until the Huskers participate in a novelty postseason event in Las Vegas, where he’ll shine and earn a rotation spot. None of this makes sense.
Just wait till you see the starting point guard, a 5-11 former walk-on who, according to Nebraska’s all-time leading scorer, Dave Hoppen, looks more like a wrestler than a basketball player. Coming out of high school, he won’t have a single Division I scholarship offer. His first couple years, he literally won’t tell Coach his personal goals because he thinks Coach will shrug him off or – worse – laugh at him. This is notable because Coach is his father!
But Sam Hoiberg gets better and better. He’ll embody the intangibles that Nebraska sorely lacked when he arrived. By his fifth year, he’ll become one of the Big Ten’s best players and finish his career with the most wins of any Husker in school history.
In other words: Fred Hoiberg will follow in the footsteps of the grandpa he cherished but never knew. And when disaster strikes, the person who bails him out – and saves his coaching legacy – is a kid who had no business even dreaming he could play at Nebraska. His own son!
But that’s not everything, because Sam’s twin brother will actually join the coaching staff for this storybook season. And the second-round thriller in Oklahoma City, one of the wildest games of March Madness in perhaps the most electric NCAA tournament atmosphere of all time, falls on Sam’s and Charlie’s 23rd birthday.
And the whole ride, every minute of every game, will be narrated by the program’s unofficial mascot, the bowtie-wearing broadcaster who tattoos fans’ favorite calls on his wrists – Got it! – the man who has described about 1,262 Husker basketball games dating back to Watergate. A month shy of his 77th birthday, Kent Pavelka will never feel more alive. And more nervous.
Tyler Tanner’s half-court shot hangs in the air for almost exactly two seconds. Long enough for some 15,000 Husker fans – and a few million around the world – to feel their hearts in their throat.
The ball begins its descent as the horn blares. It smacks the glass behind the rim … then bounces into the front of the iron … then to the back iron … then out. Right in front of Pavelka.
“OH MY GOD, it’s no good! Oh my lord! In and out at the buzzer! Nebraska to the Sweet 16! It is a miracle finish for Nebraska! And it was destined to happen! It was destined to happen!”
The Husker volleyball team watches the final shot from a dark airplane at 30,000 feet coming home from its final spring match in Florida. “No. No. No. Yes!”
Kevin McHale watches from his house in Arizona. “Oh!” Nick Bahe watches from a tiny radio studio in California. “It was like you watched ‘Rocky.’ It was like a movie.”
Dave Trouba watches from Taiwan, where it was almost noon Sunday. “It felt like 50 years of being a Nebraska basketball fan coming out all at once.” Ted Glock watches from his living room south of Rising City, my hometown. He drops to his knees and yells, “Oh, no!” Immediately he calls his son in Kansas, who had just dropped to his knees and yelled the exact same thing. Chalk it up to genetics, Glock says.
Meg Flynn, 29, watches from Madison, Wisconsin, after calling her brother in Omaha and making him play the radio broadcast — the entire game — on speakerphone. She wanted to hear Pavelka’s call. “I did not breathe for a solid minute. I just looked at the TV like, I think that went in.”
Payton Sandfort, Pryce’s big brother, watches from his G League charter bus in Memphis. His phone video lagged a few seconds behind a teammate’s stream in a different row. “He starts screaming and I’m like, ‘Oh my God, did it actually go in?’”
Emmanuel Bandoumel, a Husker senior in 2023, watches from his couch in Finland, where he was playing professionally. It was 6 a.m. and he had a game the night before and he kept thinking, “Don’t fall asleep!” When the shot rattles out, Bandoumel jumps off the couch, shouts “Let’s go!” and wakes up his roommate.
Erick Strickland, who helped NU win a Big Eight tournament title in 1994 before playing nine seasons in the NBA, watches from his suburban Dallas living room. Anytime you’re on the verge of breaking a barrier, he says, you think about worst-case scenario. “When I saw the release, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, it’s got a chance.’” When it missed, Strickland groans. “Ohhh, thank you!”
In Colorado, 83-year-old Grant Simmons, NU’s All-Big Eight guard in 1966, watches from his living room with a Nebraska native neighbor whose two grade-school sons arrived wearing personalized “Simmons” jerseys. In Florida, Jerry Fort, NU’s All-Big Eight guard in 1974 and ’75, watches with his sleeping wife. “My heart went up in my throat. I don’t know how that ball didn’t go down.”
In Oklahoma City, the Huskers don’t even celebrate right away. They’re too stunned.
“I was just preparing for the heartbreak,” Sam Hoiberg said. “It took me a second to realize it didn’t go in.”
“I’ve never seen a half-court shot look that perfect in the air,” Rienk Mast said.
“I almost died,” Pryce Sandfort said.
“It just took my breath away,” Fred Hoiberg said.
“If the ball was just a little deflated,” Jamarques Lawrence said, “we would’ve lost that game.”
When triumph sinks in, Husker players circle the floor around the lower bowl, high-fiving fans. As they reach Pavelka and smother him one by one in sweaty hugs, ask yourself this: How often does life produce this kind of moment?
You might take individual joy in a baby’s first laugh. A 7-iron straight at the flag. A movie twist you didn’t see coming. Ocean waves lapping under the moon. Saturday morning in a duck blind.
But how many moments produce spontaneous, unbridled, collective joy? How many moments connect the dots within a neighborhood, a town, a state? How many rattle the bones of an entire community? “It’s hard to put that into the right words,” former Husker Bruce Chubick said. “Sports is still one of those things.”
After Nebraska’s barrier-breaking, first-round win over Troy, Chubick’s son bought him a ticket to the Vanderbilt game – “You’re going,” Trey said. Bruce woke up Saturday before dawn and drove seven hours from Omaha. He found two old teammates, poached a seat – abandoned by a Texas A&M fan – and watched from Paycom Center’s lower bowl behind the Vanderbilt basket.
The 55-year-old power forward, who played in four NCAA tournament losses in the 1990s and wears the battle scars and a crooked nose to prove it, absorbs the scene before finally climbing the steps toward the concourse, where a stranger recognizes him. Points at him. “Enjoy this. Your fingerprints are on this, too.” Chubick, perhaps the toughest former Husker of all, tears up.
That’s what this book is about. “The Quest,” as Pavelka calls it. The neverending question: Are we ever gonna get there? Are we ever gonna BE what we want to BE?
Nebraska didn’t win the Big Ten in 2025-26. It didn’t make the Final Four. But over a span of five months, Pavelka says, no college basketball team delivered more satisfaction to its fan base. Yes, including national champion Michigan.
“Sweet Dreams” chronicles Nebraska’s epic season, culminating in Oklahoma City. But that’s not nearly enough. It also documents the remarkable life of Fred Hoiberg, the All-American boy. It also details the forgotten history of the program, all the times Husker hoops got halfway up the mountain and crashed backward. To fully appreciate OKC, you need to see the whole climb.
For 87 years of NCAA tournaments, Big Red wore the guilt and shame of inferiority. A scarlet letter. Then the gods of March Madness paid it all back in one weekend. Keeping a lid on Vanderbilt’s basket liberated Nebraska. No wonder Pavelka’s voice quaked with shock, exhaustion and gratitude.
“I have never broadcast a game like this in my lifetime and I’ve done this since 1974. Listen to Nebraska’s crowd! … Holy cow. Holy cowabunga. … Oh, Freddy! Freddy, my boy!”
Hoiberg comes from a long line of high achievers. Sportsmen. Preachers. Professors. In this book, you’ll meet them. But there’s another tradition in his family. Tricksters. Cards especially.
Pick a card, any card. Got it? Now put it back in the deck.
Fred’s grandpa Jerry Bush could take the full deck and throw it against the wall, 51 pieces flying everywhere. Except one card, stuck to the wall with a thumb tack. Your card.
Fred never saw Grandpa’s signature trick. His go-to play is “The Wizard,” a tag-team trick that started with his dad, Eric, and now features his older brother, Steve.
Pick a card, any card. Hold onto it.
Now Fred dials up “The Wizard” – that’s actually how Steve is labeled in his contacts. From the other end of the phone, without ever seeing you, the Wizard can guess your card. How? The Hoiberg brothers aren’t telling. If I divulge the details, Fred said, “then I can’t do it anymore.”
The story of Nebraska basketball is one of improbable futility and durable mediocrity and herculean endurance and, finally, a breakthrough. But the story is also open to interpretation. You can think Tyler Tanner’s half-court shot rattled out because the ball contained too much air, or because 15,000 fans overcame the laws of gravity and willed it out of that hoop, or because victory was “destined to happen.”
Or you can believe in another explanation for the winter of 2025-26. And that night in OKC. And the moment when joy overflowed and connected Husker fans around the world. Individual joy is precious. But collective joy? There’s only one word for that.
Magic.
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