LINCOLN, Neb. -- Sometimes athletes will say they get more nervous when they're watching a replay of a dramatic victory. Because away from the actual heat of competition, they more fully realize just how easily it could have gone the other way.
That might be the case for Nebraska's volleyball players whenever they watch their NCAA tournament match Friday against Penn State. When they see just how far over the precipice their season seemed to be before they somehow reeled it back.
They had a sense, actually, that it might be over. But for virtually everyone watching, it pretty much was over. Except then, amazingly, it wasn't.
And after a 3-2 victory over Penn State in the NCAA regional semifinals, the top-seeded Huskers almost looked as if they couldn't quite believe what they'd just pulled off.
With four NCAA titles, Nebraska has done a great deal in this sport. But one thing the Huskers haven't done is win back-to-back NCAA championships. And it looked as if that dream was going to end for this year -- along with the careers of some outstanding seniors -- at the hands of Big Ten rival Penn State.
The Huskers were all but beaten: down 2-0 in sets and facing two match points in the third set. The Nittany Lions needed one swing to finish them off.
"Well, I'm not going to lie," Huskers senior Amber Rolfzen said, "It's not that I didn't have confidence, but I was like, 'This might be it. So just give it our all.'"
She got the kill to erase one match point. Then she and setter Kelly Hunter -- who was also a high school teammate of twins Amber and Kadie Rolfzen -- got a block to even the set 24-24. Hunter said it was Amber who got a hand on Simone Lee's attack.
"My left," a smiling Rolfzen said of the hand that saved the Huskers' season. "It's just one of those things that ... if you lose the point, you're done. You go all-out and give your best effort.
"Simone was their big go-to, and I just knew they were going to set her, so I made a big explosive move and took away her shot. And we just ... won from there."
OK, but it wasn't that easy. Mikaela Foecke, who was last year's most outstanding player in the final four when Nebraska beat Texas for the title, wasn't having a great day attacking Friday.
But she got the two kills that gave the Huskers a 26-24 victory in the third set. Then, the sold-out crowd at the Devaney Center -- the place was packed despite an 11 a.m. start on a weekday -- breathed a sigh of relief that the Huskers were still alive.
But still far from being victors. That would take two more sets and more of the just-focus-on-this-point mentality from Nebraska. The Huskers won the fourth set 25-19 and took all the momentum into the fifth set, winning that one 15-6.
"If somebody would have said you're going to have match point in the air with your best kid taking a swing to win 3-0, I'd have taken it," Penn State coach Russ Rose said. "We had it; we didn't close the deal, and we lost a lot of our energy after that. A couple of kids ran out of gas. The benefit of playing at home is what you saw there."
Indeed, the 8,240 mostly red-clad fans were about as loud as Nebraska coach John Cook said he's ever heard them, and their energy helped revive the Huskers. But it came down to Nebraska making huge plays at crucial moments when anything less meant they were done in this tournament.
Briana Holman, a transfer from LSU playing her first season at Nebraska, led the way in kills with 17, and she also had two block solos and five block assists. Amber Rolfzen had 15 kills and four block assists, while Kadie Rolfzen had 14 kills.
Afterward, Cook -- who has coached some amazing matches in his 17 seasons with the Huskers -- acknowledged even he was a little in awe of what his team had just done against a gutsy Penn State team. The Nittany Lions have won seven NCAA titles -- the most all time -- and even if this was a so-called "down" season for them as the No. 16 seed overall, they were still a formidable foe. One that fell a point short of a huge upset.
"I was trying to enjoy the moment," Cook said, "because that was a great match."