They have never won an NCAA tournament game. Is the ninth time the charm?

Kent Pavelka has seen a lot since he started calling Nebraska men’s basketball games on the radio in 1974.

But after 51 years, he’s still waiting to see the Cornhuskers do something every other team in a powerhouse NCAA conference has already accomplished: win a game in the NCAA tournament.

The Nebraska men are 0-8 all-time in the annual postseason that crowns a national champion. He has lost as a favorite (third in 1991, sixth in 1994 and eighth in 2024) and as a loser. They have lost by just five points (1991) and have been defeated by up to 21 (1992).

After a while, as more programs won their first all-time tournament game, leaving Nebraska in an increasingly exclusive and ignominious club, fans resigned themselves to disappointment, Pavelka said.

“I’m pretty old here,” Pavelka told NBC News. “I’ve been thinking, how many more rodeos do I have left?”

This winter, however, as the Huskers are off to a 15-0 start on their way to a program-record fourth seed in the tournament (they’ll face 13th-seeded Troy on Thursday), something different has taken hold in Lincoln and beyond: optimism that this finally It could be the year March doesn’t drive the Huskers crazy.

“Here we are, deep in the movie ‘Hoosiers,’ but it’s about Huskers,” Pavelka said. “And we don’t know how it’s going to end, but we have the feeling that this is he. “This is the year.”

Every spring, the volatility of the NCAA tournament, where the lowest-ranked schools have toppled the best, twice, and programs without tradition regularly catch fire, turns the competition into a phenomenon. However, since their first appearance in 1986, when a top player suffered a season-ending knee injury weeks before the tournament, the Huskers have continually been bitten in the postseason.

Eight Division I men’s programs have played in seven or more NCAA tournaments but have never won, said Joe Spagnolo, executive director of Hoop Historians. But unlike the likes of Boise State (0-10), Eastern Kentucky (0-8) and Colgate, Long Island University, Louisiana Monroe and South Dakota State (all 0-7), Nebraska has long played in some of the country’s most powerful conferences, theoretically allowing more resources to recruit and play better schedules.

It hasn’t exactly eased Nebraska’s drought frustration that Creighton, a smaller private school 59 miles away in Omaha, has become a March Madness staple, with an all-time tournament record of 21-27.

Rienk Mast, a 6-foot-10 senior for the Huskers from Holland, said he was aware of the drought when he transferred to Nebraska two years ago. The potential to go down in history as the team that would break the streak influenced his transfer, he said.

“Sometimes I read comment sections and no matter how well we’re doing, there’s always comments like ‘They’ve never won an NCAA tournament,’ and it always comes up,” Mast said.

“Whether we’re good, if we’re bad, it’s something that’s still a dark spot for our program, and to be the team that finally, finally gets first, yeah, I just want people to stop talking about it, honestly. So we have to do it this year. This is the best opportunity the program has had in decades. So we have to do it.”

Twenty-eight years ago, Tyronn Lue thought his team could be the one to end the streak.

Lue, a small but lightning-quick guard from Missouri, was being recruited by Nebraska as the Huskers made the tournament for four consecutive seasons from 1991 to 1994. They returned to the Big Dance in 1998, Lue’s junior season, when he overcame Arkansas’ trademark full-court press and got his teammates to open dunks to build a lead that grew to 10 in the second half.

The Razorbacks then stopped pressing and defended Lue using a triangle and two, a rarely used zone. Nebraska’s shots stopped falling.

By now you know the rest.

“Football school still can’t win an NCAA basketball tournament game,” the next day’s AP summary began.

Lue, who coached the Cleveland Cavaliers to the 2016 NBA championship and coached the Los Angeles Clippers since 2020, blocked much of the game, the last of his Nebraska career before leaving for the NBA. But as he read the 28-year-old’s losing score before a recent game, Lue pursed his lips and shook his head slightly.

It took Nebraska another 16 years to return to the tournament.

“In building the team we have now, Fred has done a great job,” Lue said of coach Fred Hoiberg. “The players have done a great job. We support them and encourage them, but this would be like a breath of fresh air, like a sigh of relief. So hopefully it can happen.”

As Nebraska moved up the Big Ten Conference standings this season, Lue texted Hoiberg, who spent two decades in the NBA before landing at Nebraska. But he’s not the only alumnus keeping close tabs. Pavelka has received text messages from ex-Huskers who played as far back as the 1970s.

Andy Markowski, a former Huskers forward who played with Lue in the 1990s and still lives in Nebraska, experienced some catharsis in 2024 when the Nebraska women’s team, starring his daughter, Alexis, won an NCAA tournament for the first time in a decade. (All-time, the university’s women’s team is 7-11 in the tournament.) However, on the same day, the Nebraska men lost their own March Madness game by 15 to extend the drought.

A few weeks ago, Markowski began studying where the Nebraska men in the group were expected to land and began booking hotel rooms in potential host cities. This year, the selection committee placed the Huskers in Oklahoma City, just a six-hour drive from Lincoln.

“I think half the state will try to travel and capture the moment,” Markowski said.

That includes him.

“I’m not going to miss that first win if it happens,” he added.

Pavelka started thinking this might be the season after watching the team practice last summer. He began telling friends that Braden Frager, a 6-foot-7 freshman from Lincoln, might be the best player on the team.

Since then, Frager has become invaluable. Sam Hoiberg, the headband-wearing son of the coach and former assistant, has become so popular that “he could run for mayor, just like Dad,” wrote Omaha World-Herald columnist Tom Shatel. Leading scorer Pryce Sandfort has scored 30 or more points three times this season. Fans stopped Mast at the supermarket to ask for selfies.

Pavelka has called two Nebraska football national championships, but said his emotional attachment to those championship teams pales in comparison to this season, he said. However, it is easy for him to get attached. He realized the Huskers had captured the imagination of even casual fans a few weeks ago when he went to his dentist’s office and the receptionists wanted to talk about Sandfort.

“We’d like to get rid of that stigma, but this has been a special season,” Markowski said. “Not only is it a really good team, but it really matches the identity of our state. They play together. They have players that have incredibly great intangibles.”

It would be understandable if the Huskers’ history could lead to pessimism about another March disappointment this week. But certain moments have led Pavelka to believe this team can win in big moments, like Jamarques Lawrence’s 3-pointer at the buzzer in December to beat a ranked Illinois team on the road.

“Ahh! Ahh! Ahh!” Pavelka shouted into his microphone after the shot. “Two seconds left. I’m playing in bounds. I’m going to pass out!”

To avoid similar emotions coming over him should Nebraska earn a drought-breaking victory later this month, Pavelka has already prepared what he will say if the long-awaited moment arrives. He compared himself to a child on Christmas morning, wondering if a long-awaited gift will finally feel as euphoric as he had long hoped for.

“Can it possibly live up to expectations? I don’t even know what my expectations are,” he said. “But am I going to start crying again? I don’t know.”