They’ve never won an NCAA Tournament game. Is 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 witness the Cornhuskers do something that every other team from an NCAA power conference has already accomplished: win a game in the NCAA tournament.

Nebraska’s men are 0-8 all-time in the annual postseason that crowns a national champion. It has lost as a higher seed — third in 1991, sixth in 1994 and eighth in 2024 — and as an underdog. They’ve lost by as few as five points (1991) and been blown out by as many as 21 (1992).

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

“I’m pretty long in the tooth here,” Pavelka told NBC News. “I’ve been thinking, how many more rodeos do I have?”

This winter, however, as the Huskers started 15-0 on its way to earning a program-record No. 4 seed in the tournament — they will face 13th-seeded Troy on Thursday — something different has taken hold in Lincoln and beyond: optimism that this finally could be the year that March won’t drive the Huskers mad.

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

Every spring, the volatility of the NCAA tournament, where the lowest-seeded schools have toppled the highest, twice, and tradition-less programs regularly catch fire, turns the competition into a phenomenon. Yet starting with its first appearance in 1986, when a top player suffered a season-ending knee injury weeks before the tournament, the Huskers have continually been snakebit in the postseason.

Eight Division I men’s programs have played in seven or more NCAA tournaments but have never won, said Joe Spagnolo, the executive director of the 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, which theoretically allows for more resources to recruit and play better schedules.

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

Rienk Mast, a 6-foot-10 Huskers senior from the Netherlands, 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 factored into his transfer, he said.

“I sometimes read comment sections and however good we’re doing, there’s always comments about, ‘They’ve never won an NCAA tournament game,’ and it always gets brought up,” Mast said.

“If we’re good, if we’re bad, it’s a thing that’s still kind of a dark spot of our program, and to be the team that finally, finally gets that first one, yeah — I just want people to stop talking about it, honestly. So we need to get it done this year. This is about as good of a chance as the program has had in decades. So we need to get it done.”

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

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

Then the Razorbacks dropped their press, instead defending Lue using a triangle-and-two, a rarely used zone. Nebraska’s shots stopped falling.

By now, you know the rest.

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

Lue, who coached the Cleveland Cavaliers to the 2016 NBA championship and has coached the Los Angeles Clippers since 2020, has blocked out much of the game, the last of his Nebraska career before leaving for the NBA. But while reading the box score of the 28-year-old loss before a recent game, Lue pursed his lips, slightly shaking his head.

It took another 16 years for Nebraska to make it back to the tournament.

“Putting together the team that we got now, Fred’s done a great job,” Lue said of coach Fred Hoiberg. “The players have done a great job. We’re rooting and cheering for them, but this would be like a breath of fresh air, like a sigh of relief. So hopefully it can happen.”

As Nebraska climbed the Big Ten Conference standings this season, Lue texted with Hoiberg, who spent two decades in the NBA before landing at Nebraska. But he’s not the only alumni keeping close watch. Pavelka has received texts 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 Nebraska’s women’s team, starring his daughter, Alexis, won an NCAA tournament game for the first time in a decade. (All-time, the university’s women’s team is 7-11 in the tournament.) The very same day, though, Nebraska’s men lost their own March Madness game by 15 to extend the drought.

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

“I think half the state’s going to 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 began thinking this could be the season after watching the team practice last summer. He began telling friends that Braden Frager, a 6-foot-7 freshman from Lincoln, could be the team’s best player.

Frager has since become invaluable. Sam Hoiberg, the headband-wearing coach’s son and former walk-on has become so popular 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 have stopped Mast in the grocery store to request selfies.

Pavelka has called two Nebraska national championships in football but said his emotional attachment to those title teams pales to this season, he said. It’s easy for him to get attached, though. 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 would like to get that stigma removed from us, but this has been a special season,” Markowski said. “Not only is it a really good team, they really match the identity of our state. They play together. They have role guys that have unbelievably great intangibles.”

It would be understandable if the Huskers’ history could spark 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 yelled into his microphone after the shot. “Two seconds to go. Inbounds play. I’m going to pass out!”

To ward off similar emotions overtaking him should Nebraska earn a drought-breaking win later this month, Pavelka has already prepared what he will say should the long-awaited moment arrive. He likened himself to a child on Christmas morning, wondering whether a much-anticipated gift will ultimately feel as euphoric as he has long hoped.

“Can it possibly live up to whatever the expectations are that — I don’t even know what I have for expectations,” he said. “But, am I going to start bawling again? I don’t know.”