Just looking at Tom Osborne could be enough to make you cry.

No, not just on the night in question: that night thirty years ago he raised two fingers in the air, and Turner Gill lined up over center, and rolled right, and sighted Jeff Smith, and let the ball go into the warm Miami air…

No, it was all those Saturday afternoons of my childhood, throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s. All those days that the sight of him coaching from the Nebraska sidelines could make you, if not cry, at least tear up a little.

Maybe it was the string of dismal 9-2 seasons that hung around his neck like a rosary of hot coals on some 17th-century martyr.

Or maybe it was because of how he attired himself for his Saturday duties. Other legendary coaches of the era wore sport coats and ties. Tom Osborne jogged onto the field in white knit golf shirts and bright red belt-less coaching pants. They sported iconic fedoras and cursed. Tom Osborne wore clunky earphones and chewed gum.

But maybe the real reason Tom Osborne could envelope you in a wave of mysterious sadness, could break your heart every moment of your life, was because he just seemed so nice, and good, and true. Yet at the same time you never quite knew what he was thinking or feeling. Whether Nebraska won or lost its football games, he was always so even, so composed. All the fair-skinned, red-haired, plain-spoken, tall and slender life of him was drawn together in stolidity and rationality and Methodism. He was a blank slate upon which we fans read what we needed to read, felt what we needed to feel.

What many of us felt (or maybe only I felt) was a desire to comfort, comfort our coach in all his niceness and goodness and lack of emotion that few beyond the borders of Nebraska would ever fully understand. For how many other states would glorify reserve so nakedly by putting the following quote on sports memorabilia: “I celebrate a victory when I start walking off the field.” says Osborne, as imprinted on a Husker poster. “By the time I get to the locker room, I’m done.”