A long line of Nike executives have set up family camp in Lake Oswego. Everyone knows that. But I'll bet what you didn't know is that an Adidas executive lives there, too.

Mr. Three Stripes lives smack in the middle of Swooshville. I met the guy once for coffee. He has kids who go to school there. His neighbors always smile and wave, but he jokes when the invites go out for those high school graduation parties he might as well be Edward Snowden.

Not on the guest list.

What I'm saying is, this Nike-Adidas thing is a rivalry. Everyone in this state knows knows someone wrapped up with it, including this Nebraska-Oregon meeting on Saturday. Because while it's an important football game for two college programs, it also happens to be the latest installment of this ongoing Sneaker War. One that, this week, highlights the bond between Nebraska and Adidas.

Oregon is Nike's flagship university athletics department. Nebraska is the original, longest-standing football cornerstone Adidas program. Which brings us to Peter Moore, of course. He was Nike's first head designer, a brilliant talent who later ended up with the keys to Adidas.

You remember those 1985-release Air Jordan I's from Nike? That's Moore's work. A decade later, Moore found himself on a plane screaming toward Lincoln trying to cut a landmark agreement for rival Adidas.

"The reason we wanted Nebraska was because Tom Osborne was the football coach," Moore said Thursday from his home in Northeast Portland. "He'd built a real football program with athletes in a proper way. We felt that really fit what Adidas wanted to be -- a basic sports brand without all the MOFOs and slam dunks."

Osborne waited in Lincoln to listen to the Adidas pitch. So did athletic department staff, including then-Athletic Director, Bill Byrne and then-football operations director Steve Pederson. Byrne ends up an interesting figure here because he took the job at Nebraska in 1992 after starting his athletic director career at Oregon.

"As much as I love Nike and my friend Phil Knight," Byrne said, "Adidas had good people, too, and had our attention."

Prior to 1995, Nebraska was all over the place with its apparel and sneaker agreements. The individual coaches of the respective athletics programs were allowed to negotiate independently with companies. It was a practice that would eventually be phased out.

"We had one program wearing APEX jerseys, and another wearing Nike shoes, and there was Adidas, too, and football was wearing Converse shoes and APEX jerseys and everything else in between," Byrne said. "It made no sense."

Moore and his team eventually wanted Nebraska for themselves. All of it. From women's volleyball to basketball to football. But it would start with Osborne and football. And that began with convincing the Huskers football program that Adidas was the right partner. But how do you 'wow' a university like Nebraska while simultaneously playing to its grounded core values?

"Nebraska wasn't so flashy and trashy," Moore said. "I think, for us, it was a perfect fit. For anyone else, Nebraska wasn't quite Hollywood enough for them. We went in there with some boards with drawings on it. We had type-written pages and products to show them. We had quality stuff. We knew we could make quality product. You're talking to people who were mid-westerners.

"They weren't interested in tin foil and flash and trash."

Like I said, it's a rivalry, folks.

Anyone around here who has ever worn Adidas sneakers and a Nike sweatsuit to the gym and received disapproving glares understands. On one side, there's a Beaverton-based company that was started in the 1960s by a middle-distance runner and his coach. On the other, an older German-based company that eventually hired one-time Nike superstars Moore and Rob Strasser and moved North American headquarters to Portland.

So yeah, it was on between these two, even in 1995. Moore was on the plane headed to Lincoln. Nike was locked up in a bidding war with Reebok over Michigan (which Nike won by tossing an $8 million bid at the Wolverines).

"Nike may have talked to Nebraska," Moore said, "but Nike was busy with that Michigan deal. Nebraska wanted to be important. They were important to us."

Adidas pitched that one of its employees would be relocated to the campus in Lincoln to work more closely with the university. The college bookstore would also feature apparel. Also, there was an agreement by Adidas to buy prime signage inside the football stadium. And Memorial Stadium's HuskerVision video screen, the first of its kind in college football, would feature Adidas messaging.

Moore, now 72 and still consulting with Adidas, said, "We went way beyond our means to sign them."

Nebraska inked a five-year agreement with Adidas in 1995. By law, Byrne said, it was the maximum length of contract the state of Nebraska would allow a public entity to sign. It included provisions that gave Adidas exclusive negotiating periods at the end of every contract and the right of first refusal. Over the next few years, Nebraska moved the entire athletics department to Adidas.

"They were our first all-school deal," said Chris McGuire, who serves now as Sr. Director of Sports Marketing for Adidas. "Nebraska helped us define ourselves. They won national championships wearing Adidas."

Adidas now has more than 100 agreements with college athletics programs, 10 of which are Power Five conference members.

"We like to have a personal relationship," McGuire said. "It evolves over time into more collaboration and innovation, and getting the athletes what they need to be successful."

Current Huskers coach Mike Riley pointed out this week that there's still an Adidas employee who has an office on campus in Lincoln, just like that original agreement. The focus now is product development, research, innovation, and Riley said, "they're involved here and very hands-on."

Riley also remembers, in 1997 while coaching at Oregon State that Nike offered his Beavers an apparel contract when nobody else would. He shook his head and said OSU wore Nike shoes and Russell-brand jerseys prior to that.

"I think Oregon State fans in general were always kind of leery of Nike because of that relationship that Phil (Knight) and everybody had with Oregon, but I always thought they did great for us and went out of their way.

"(Nike designer) Tinker Hatfield came down when we were kind of re-branding... we had people come down from Nike testing almost weekly."

Nebraska's current five-year contract with Adidas runs through 2018. It nets the athletic department $1 million in cash and $3 million in footwear and apparel annually. The agreement now includes a $10,000 annual campus event for Nebraska students, $40,000 in Adidas gear for Huskers student sections and $50,000 in gear for Nebraska stadium ushers.

"What they have now," Byrne said, "beats our deal."

Oregon has its multitude of Nike jersey combinations. Late this summer Adidas unveiled alternative "Husker Chrome" compression-fit uniforms for Nebraska. They'll be worn Sept. 24 vs. Northwestern and according to the news release have "player numbers featured in metallic red and metallic chrome outlining on the back of the helmet, showcasing the Star City's ability to shine."

The uniform, McGuire said, took hints from Lincoln and from the state of Nebraska.

"We have that staff on site, as a subset of the university," he said. "We're there to work together. It's really about being all in... a Nebraska win is an Adidas win.

"This is a good thing."

This all began, of course, on that airplane in 1995. The Air Jordan I designer and the rest of the new Adidas America team were headed to Lincoln to win over Nebraska football. Moore and his team couldn't have known where it might lead, or that it would last so long. They couldn't have imagined a Saturday in Sept. of 2016 where it might again resurface.

Said Moore: "We just felt Nebraska fit who Adidas was, and who Adidas wanted to become, too."

--- @JohnCanzanoBFT