A football team at last

The ghost of I.M. Hipp Past was not stalking the grounds, on this afternoon five days before a Halloween. There would be no Nebraska I-backs wading through a pile of inert objects posing as the Indiana defense, no 69-17 smoking craters with scraps of smoldering Hoosier jerseys lying about.

Nope. This time, 69-17 was Indiana 38, Nebraska 31. In Lincoln. In the temple of Bob Devaney, Tom Osborne, all those guys.

If you put a title on it, it would be Hey, Look, It's A Football Team, and also (of course) You Ain't So Hipp No More, I.M. Which of course refers to the Nebraska I-back who scorched the Hoosiers two straight years back in the long ago -- 1977 and 1978, when Nebraska won 31-13 in Lincoln behind 254 yards from Hipp, and then 69-17 the next year in Bloomington, when Hipp scored four times and ran for another 123 yards.

Not that any of the Hoosiers who beat the Cornhuskers yesterday will remember any of that, of course. Which is probably a good thing, because lighting a candle to your football past tends to be counterproductive when your past is already a dumpster fire.

No, this football team is too busy living in the now to wallow in the then, and good for it. A lot of us (OK, most of us) rolled our eyes to the heavens when the yearly hype started up about these Hoosiers -- the hype that promised This Team was Going To Be Different, a real boy, Pinocchio, with blockin' and tacklin' and all that other football stuff.

Well. The Hoosiers are now 6-2 going on 7-2, with Big Ten bottom-scraper Northwestern lugging a 1-6 record to B-town next week. After that they've got Penn State, Michigan and 2-6 Purdue to finish out, so (realistically) we're looking at 8-4 and a berth in some bowl a step or so above Radial Tire or Garden Implement.

Not that Tom Allen's crew wouldn't take a Radial Tire or Garden Implement, mind you.

The Hoosiers, after all, haven't played in any sort of bowl in three years, even though there are so many bowls these days you can pretty much get into one with a couple of boxtops from your favorite breakfast cereal. And this is the first time they've gotten to six wins in October since 1993, before Facebook and Twitter and incriminating Instagram photos.

To be sure, this was not one of your great Nebraska teams Indiana dispatched yesterday, and they still (mostly) can't stop anybody, a chronic staple of Indiana football. But attention must be paid, and credit must be given when due.

Even I.M. Hipp would agree with that.