John Cook has spent more than two decades in Lincoln first as an assistant to Terry Pettit and then as the head coach when Pettit retired after the 1999 season. His daughter, Lauren, played three seasons at Nebraska and was an All-American.

Cook is a Husker, through and through.

He’s also a sports fan in general and of football in particular. It’s hard to make it through a Cook press conference without getting some kind of football reference or analogy. So it should come as no surprise that he had thoughts on Scott Frost’s return to Lincoln to take over as the head football coach.

“I was actually driving down O Street when that press conference was going on and I was getting tears in my eyes,” Cook said. “I texted Coach [Tom] Osborne and Scott both telling them I haven’t felt that way in years, how I felt with what was going on that day.”

Cook wasn’t the only member of the Nebraska volleyball family who was moved to tears, however.

“Dani Busboom [Kelly] calls me soon after that and she goes, ‘Did you cry?’” Cook said. “I said ‘A little bit.’ She said, ‘Lane (her husband) and I were bawling. I thought I was far enough away from Nebraska, but it never leaves you.’ That’s a great testament to how powerful a day that is and how much excitement and how much pride there is in Nebraska right now. Obviously there’s a lot of pride in volleyball, but we want to get all the teams feeling like that.”

Cook said he saw plenty of that pride on display all over the city on Sunday.

“The other thing I noticed is I went to the store, I went to several places and a lot of people were wearing Nebraska stuff on Sunday,” Cook said. “It was pretty cool.”

Winter has officially arrived in Nebraska, and its impact is being felt all over the state.