"Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things. And no good thing ever dies."

Andy Dufresne wrote those words to his friend Red once he had crawled through a river of, well, you know how the movie goes.

Buckle up, Husker fans, we're in the river where we don't want to be. Instead of winning our second consecutive road game for the first time since 2006, the Huskers did next to nothing Friday night in Minneapolis, falling to the Minnesota Golden Gophers 24-6.

Nebraska never got its offense off the ground, and what little yardage it could muster was negated by nine sacks for 63 yards. Even taking away the penalties (6/65 compared to 3/30 for Minnesota), the Huskers were simply outplayed.

And you hate to see it.

Maybe you hated seeing the all-white uniforms. Maybe the pink accents instead of the traditional red caused a visual anomaly for the Huskers.

This game was lost on the offensive line. And the maddening part is that it provides a blueprint for the remaining Husker opponents on how to beat us. We were thinking "10-2, 11-1, a bubble CFP team." Now we face a repeat of 2024 when we started 5-1 and became bowl eligible in the second-to-last game.

So about that hope? Where'd that go?

Here's the thing…if you didn't have hope, you wouldn't watch the game. If you didn't have hope, you wouldn't watch this show. We are all here because we hope things will get better. No one is cashing out. No one should be throwing in the towel on a 5-2 team that is still steeped in capability.

So it wasn't their night on Friday. Saturday's game against Northwestern is a new day. All we can do is HOPE that this coaching staff will have these players ready to go then.

Go Big Red. Even in the face of Armageddon.