Well, I’m back.

It’s been a long, fun and sometimes strange two week stretch for ol’ @HuskerlandBob but it is great to be back in the office and commencing our 2022 football coverage, among other topics.

I won’t bore you with every last detail but last October Huskerland Penni and I decided to take a week-long trip to Arizona after state basketball, to take in spring training baseball and some of the sights that part of the world had to offer. (First off, it was her idea not mine, which ranks up there with Villanova over Georgetown, 1984, on the list of greatest all-time upsets.)

It was also awfully nice of MLB and the owners to sort through all the cash and come to some sort of agreement that allowed the 2022 season to start in time for us to see three games that week. Mix in the Grand Canyon visit and a trip to Sedona, and you have a pretty great week.

That I knew was coming, that was planned.

Our daughter, Huskerland Jessie, has her birthday on March 30 and we were going to be back in time to celebrate with Sis, and that was very important to all of us, of course. But wait, she had other plans. Gonna go to Nashville, or maybe it was Kansas City, to celebrate her landmark birthday. Either way, we were going to have our family celebration after the fact.

Soooo, when my friend Mike Malm called and said, hey, would you like to go to Las Vegas for a week of golf, I said sure - when?

The day after you get back from Phoenix.

Oh.

Hmm. Gone from home basically 14 days in a row. Never done that before, and it seemed long. Let me think that over.

I speak with Jess, she says to go for it because she was going to be out of town anyway. And besides, the golf event in question (on a lot of levels) was something called The Bugeater Classic, so how can you pass that up. Bugeaters. There was a meeting to determine what to call the very first University of Nebraska football team and that is what they came up with. Our forefathers conquered the wild, wild west but the best they could do for the football team was Bugeaters.)

This is getting away from me so let me just say Jess’s crew couldn’t get it together, so no trip for her, and I’d already signed up for the tournament. So after all that I was going to miss her birthday, which broke my heart, after all she’s still my little girl, so this tournament, it better be fun.

It was.

The Bugeater brought together 72 golfers, almost all of them with direct Nebraska ties. The tournament director, if that’s what you want to call it, was Courtney Fong, the pride of Bertrand, Nebraska, and we had players there from Lincoln and Omaha, of course, but also Blue Hill, Fairbury, Hebron, Oakland, Kearney, Scottsbluff and other assorted locales, like, say, Arnold. Ahem. Made for some great conversation starters, and we had a blast over the three days of the tournament.

Prior to that Mike and I had spent a couple of days in Mesquite, Nevada, located about 80 miles northeast of Las Vegas, staying the lovely home of Jack and Ella McKinney. Played a little golf up there, too.

There is much more, of course, but it was quite a two weeks away, a first for me. But as I write this I realize I am now at home, at my keyboard, writing about Nebraska high school football. Here in a bit we get the ball rolling with a couple of stories about last year’s state champions and will roll on from there with team previews and all the other fun stuff we share over the months leading up to Next Season.

Thanks for your patience while I was gone, thanks also for being part of what we do at Huskerland.