Todd Campfield’s daily commute to work is a scenic one.
Every day the general manager of the N Zone sports bar drives past Memorial Stadium before hanging a right into the Haymarket, some days probably turning at the corner occupied by Melichar’s 66 Sales and Service at 9th and P streets.
Anyone who has made the trek into Lincoln from the north knows what Campfield sees. It's easy, when you see it like that, to imagine gamedays in Lincoln. To imagine the sea of red swirling around the stadium's base and fanning out across downtown.
Saturday would have been the first of those days this fall. They're all special here, of course. But there's something about that first one.
The first sign of the season at Melichar's predicting the score of the game; the first crowd cramming into the N Zone and every other bar, grabbing some wings and slamming some beers. The early risers at the Embassy Suites, filling up on mimosas and bloody marys, and trying to shake off the effects of the night before.
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There was none of that Saturday, for some reasons that are well-known, and others that remain shrouded in mystery.
"It totally feels like something's not right. It feels like if you were missing out on a best friend's wedding — like you're not able to go. It has that kind of hollow feeling," said Jeff Melichar, the manager at Melichar's.
"Normally there's a great amount of anticipation in the air, and people are so excited, and there's always a buzz where you'll see people buying their Husker gear or talking about who's going to start, and who's going to do whatever.
"And now there's none of that."
Without football, Lincoln might as well be Valentine or Cairo or Beatrice or Gering.
That’s certainly no knock on any of those towns. One of this state’s unique traits is the fierce pride every dot on the map has in itself and its citizens, all of it well-founded.
But none of those towns is Lincoln on a gameday.
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College football is a uniquely American experience.
No other sport in the world concentrates a larger number of fans with so many different rooting interests in so many different places in so many different weekends.
"As many people come to town that don't go to the game as do go to the game," said Rick Hamann, executive vice president at Sartor Hamann Jewelers. "So you're actually probably looking at 200,000 people downtown, and that's a lot of folks. And when they're not here, it's weird."
The average size of a Big Ten football stadium is 72,004. The league’s largest venues are far bigger than the biggest NFL stadium or MLB ballpark. The average capacity is more than the three biggest NBA or NHL arenas combined.
Memorial Stadium’s listed capacity, somewhere north of 85,000, is larger than any professional venue, save for the country’s largest horse and auto racing tracks.
It truly is a miracle to pull off a successful gameday — people traveling in, directing traffic, staffing bars, hotels, restaurants, stores, gas stations. Volunteers getting the stadium ready before the game and staying long after the game has ended to clean up.
There's making sure the supply chains, particularly the ones that supply the Busch Light, burgers, brats and buns, stay up and running to meet demand.
Even the home and business owners near the stadium, who sell parking spots in their yards and lots for the thousands upon thousands of people who make Lincoln a destination for the weekend.
The whole thing is an incomprehensibly massive operation.
NU football coach Scott Frost talks often about having a whole state pulling in the same direction. What better example than the thousands of things, big and small that each person associated with a football Saturday in Lincoln, America, has to do properly just to make those days happen?
"I grew up in Lincoln, so I'm as big of a Husker fan as anyone, probably. I've been experiencing football Saturdays my whole life — just that adrenaline, and that rush you get when they play the Tunnel Walk music and the fight song and the kickoff music," Campfield said. "It's going to feel empty, weird.
"That's the thing I'm going to miss the most, just the excitement of waking up knowing that not only am I going to get to watch football, but we're going to have 12 hours of fun to go with it."
Talk about a buzz.
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Even as high school football plays on in the state, there is a different feel.
Last week in Elkhorn, the Antlers played Norris in a matchup of two of the top teams in Class B. There should have been buzz and excitement surrounding a competitive season opener. Instead, there were mostly empty bleachers, save for parents and siblings of players on each side.
There were no concession stands, no boosters selling T-shirts, no student sections lobbing vague trash talk at each other.
There was only the game, with grateful coaches and players going through the process of football in a pandemic.
But at least they had that.
Saturday morning, Hamann was loading up the family and heading to the lake.
He would have normally been manning Sartor Hamann Jewelers’ location at South Pointe Pavilions, which serves as a major stopping point for the shuttles that ferry fans to and from downtown.
Despite being nearly 10 miles from the epicenter of Nebraska's world on Saturdays, that South Pointe location does brisk business before, during and after games. If your football-obsessed partner is busy watching the game, why not go browse some jewelry?
While Hamann's business hasn't been hit as hard financially as others, there's still a feeling of loss that a jewelry store can share with a service station.
Most of the folks that park at Melichar's have been doing so for 10 years or more. Some have been coming for more than 20 years.Â
They have one of the most visible, valuable spots in town, a friendly shop dog named Tank, and a sign that probably gets more sets of eyes on it than any other with each week's predictions.
Those score predictions will continue this year, Melchar's 51st in business. But for the first time, the games on the marquee won't be Nebraska's.
Those people, and the Melichars, get a chance to reunite seven or eight times a year, gathering like aunts, uncles and cousins around a Thanksgiving dinner table.
"I think a lot of us love the camaraderie. The group of people we have here; they're more like family than friends. And every year that we do this it feels ... it's less of a job and more of a big family get-together," Melichar said. "It's like hey, we threw a huge party, and our friends and family are coming.
"It's just the energy of the town, and it's just kind of nothing right now. It's very hollow, in fact."
* * *
It stinks, and everybody knows it. None of this is fun — the not having football, the constant fighting about who is at fault, the helpless feeling of fighting an invisible, insidious virus that right now doesn't have a cure, the real lives that are deeply affected by what isn't happening this weekend.
Businesses are bleeding money. Small shops are closing up. There isn’t revenue enough to pay employees. Everyone, in every corner of the 16th-largest state by area in the union, is affected in some way.
Last year Campfield told the Journal Star that if the Huskers have a 2:30 p.m. kickoff — the sweet spot for bars and restaurants because that time frame brings in patrons before and after the game — the N Zone will sell 150-200 pounds of wings.
That won't happen this year. Maybe the NFL can help if and when it gets underway. Maybe fans will turn their gaze toward the Big 12 or the SEC or the ACC to help fill the void.
But maybe they won't.Â
Saturday morning, traffic buzzed in downtown Lincoln. It looked like a Tuesday afternoon or a Thursday evening.
It sure didn't look like a Saturday.
On Stadium Drive, where there should have been vendors and grill smoke and the smell of booze, there was instead one red pickup truck with 75-county plates — Brown County, where Ainsworth sits at the junction of Highways 7 and 20. In the cab were two kids, college students probably, driving slowly past a stadium they couldn't go into, and craning their necks as far as they could to try and see all the way to the top.
In that moment, Campfield's words earlier in the week were crystallized.
"It's going to feel," Campfield said, "like we're left out of a giant party we didn't get invited to."