“Nothing is impossible, I guess you would say, but I don’t think there was any discussion with anyone — with the networks or the conference — about it,” Hug said.

Burton said NU officials believed that they had a window in which to play the game. A kickoff around 7 p.m. A 90-minute window before a round of storms rolled through around 8:30 p.m. And then another open frame starting at 9:45 p.m., in which Nebraska officials thought they could complete the game.

The weather didn’t cooperate.

“The thing that changed the course was that storm that appeared about the time we kicked the football off,” Burton said. “... When it stalled out, and the one behind it came up, that’s when it was just like, ‘the game is not going to happen.’ ”

» NU uses a WeatherSentry system from DTN to track lightning strikes. The NCAA uses it, Hug said, and “virtually all institutions” use it. Roughly an hour before kickoff, the warmups were briefly delayed by a lightning strike — which pushed back kickoff 8 minutes.

“We got the notice when the ball was in the air,” Hug said. The lightning strike was 7½ miles away from Memorial Stadium.