It should say something about the people of Nebraska’s devotion to their football team that the only thing in the last 52 years that has kept them from selling out their stadium was an imminent threat of nuclear war.

Indeed the last time venerable Memorial Stadium wasn’t full to capacity was in 1962 with the very real concerns of the Cuban Missile Crisis hanging over the country and leaving Nebraska Cornhusker fans, quite understandably, with a bit more to worry about than whether their local footballers would beat Kansas State.

Nebraska fans pride themselves on their hospitality and, surely for the past 337 straight sold out games, have been playing host better than anyone in North America. More than 91,000 filled Memorial Stadium last weekend for the renewal of the rivalry with Miami, a record attendance for the facility that has stood on the same plot of land for 91 years.

On Saturday, the 1994 national championship team, which beat Miami at the Orange Bowl, was reunited and honoured, trotted out on the field prior to kickoff to a piercing cacophony of fans who never miss a chance to honour the glory days.

Miami and Lincoln have little in common, other than a thread of football rivalry that dates back decades. They don’t see each other very often but, when they do, it usually means something big. It is also a clash of ideology, if you want to accept that storyline. There are the amber waves of the American prairie, the good-old-boy Huskers who come from towns like Plattsmouth and Cozad, Beatrice and Murdock (population 234).

That is the binary opposite to the Hurricanes: The South Beach sun-tanners whose history is so full of debauchery, edge-of-the-rulebook cheap shots and obnoxious swaggery that ESPN needed a second “The U” documentary because all the years of Miami transgressions couldn’t fit into just one.

Nebraska fans are fine with that juxtaposition. It is among the most unassuming of states: the one where you’re welcomed with a sign telling you it is the “Home of Arbor Day”; the one that branded a new tourism slogan and came up, simply, with “Nebraska Nice”; and the one where the football helmets are white with a red N. Nebraska doesn’t do garish.

Whether you wear the friendly home colours, or the tones of a team from out of town, they will welcome you and they will do so better than anyone else, with a collective disposition that, if anyone can appreciate, it is a Canadian. Friendly Manitoba and Nebraska Nice? We’re not so different, you and I.

Nebraska is the farmhouse with the porch light on in the middle of a blue-and-blood-red sky. You’re welcome to stay, but respect the rules of the house.

Prior to last week’s kickoff, a banner held across a few rows of the student section (nicknamed The Boneyard) read “Welcome U”, a respectful gesture towards the few thousand Miami fans who made the trip and surely felt warm and honoured by their hosts’ hospitality. Floridian fans had just enough time to soak that feeling in, and perhaps ponder for a moment what a lovely offering it was, before three more signs unfurled.

“... to your worst nightmare” — with a giant skull-and-crossbones flag dotting that point of exclamation.

It was more than 8,000 students saying: Please do enjoy your stay, but if you don’t mind, we’re gonna kick your ass here for a few hours first.

Football-as-Americana is a trampled narrative that radiates the brilliance of Friday-night lights, but neglects the smudges that lay outside the edges of that glow. State championships in the movies are won on tattered fields of grey and brown and green, trampled by the decades of infallible heroes who came before. Reality, however, comes dressed in custom uniforms made by Under Armor to run 4.4 40s on synthetic surfaces in front of an audience watching on ESPN2. The fantasy fills frames on celluloid. Reality gets recruited.

Yet, for pure sport spectacle there is nothing on this continent like college football. The NFL has more clout and reach; the NHL more popular this side of the border. But neither matches the pageantry, charm and tradition that lay inside a foundation 125 years in the making. The same charm that brings an entire state — read that: an entire state — to a standstill so it can dress in red and gather in the streets and buy into, if just for a few hours, that well-constructed, beautiful fantasy.

You can surely make an argument against the big-business of the NCAA and the perils of turning teenagers into cogs of a multi-billion-dollar machine. And you wouldn’t necessarily be wrong.

You could also nitpick the continuity errors in any film you’ve ever loved. But better to fondly remember it for everything it did to move you: the perfect script; the engrossing, finely-crafted characters; the ending you’ll never forget.

On Friday, we stood on an empty field in front of empty seats underneath a bright sun that nearly consumed an entirely cloudless sky. Quiet, still and illuminated. The calm before the storm.

If you wanted perfection, that moment provided a full dose of it.

A day later in that same place, every single one of 91,585 fans stood, hollered and clapped in unison as their heroes of the past lead the way for their heroes of the now. Commingling with the deafening screams of a fanbase united in the same cause that’s been rallied upon every autumn Saturday for more than a century, a 290-piece band belted out the school’s fight song: “There Is No Place Like Nebraska.”

If there is another place, I’ve never seen it.