Before We Knew What Came Next
· Yahoo Sports
There are football games we remember because of what happened. And then there are football games we remember because of how they felt.
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On September 3, 1994, Notre Dame opened its season against Northwestern under the lights at Soldier Field. The Irish were ranked No. 3 in the country, 66,946 fans filled the stadium, and as the sun went down over Chicago and the lights came on, another Notre Dame football season was beginning.
At the time, it probably felt like the beginning of another fall. Another highly ranked Notre Dame team. Another season filled with expectations. Another Saturday when anything seemed possible.
More than three decades later, that’s exactly what makes it special.
Notre Dame entered the 1994 season carrying enormous expectations after coming agonizingly close to a national championship the year before. But much of the attention that night wasn’t focused on what the Irish had accomplished in 1993. Instead, everyone wanted to see the quarterback who had yet to throw a pass in a college football game.
Ron Powlus had arrived at Notre Dame as one of the most celebrated recruits in the country. A broken collarbone had kept him off the field as a freshman, only adding to the anticipation surrounding his eventual debut. By the time he finally stepped onto the field at Soldier Field, the expectations surrounding him were almost impossible.
Could he possibly live up to them?
Lou Holtz didn’t make anyone wait long to find out.
On Notre Dame’s first offensive play, Powlus dropped back and connected with Michael Miller for 29 yards. His first collegiate pass was complete, and it was only the beginning.
Northwestern actually controlled much of the early game. Dennis Lundy and the Wildcats’ rushing attack kept Notre Dame’s new-look defense on the field, while an aggressive Irish unit repeatedly hurt itself with penalties. Northwestern possessed the football for nearly 21 minutes in the first half, but had little to show for it.
Notre Dame’s defense bent, made mistakes and surrendered yards, but it also created turnovers. Brian Hamilton recovered a Lundy fumble, and Bobby Taylor, Travis Davis and Shawn Wooden each intercepted a pass during the game. Every time Northwestern appeared capable of making things interesting, the Irish seemed to find a way to take the football away.
And when Notre Dame’s offense finally started getting opportunities, Powlus made them count.
His first touchdown pass was a nine-yard strike to Derrick Mayes, who made a diving catch for the score. Then Powlus connected with Miller for a 42-yard gain despite taking a hit as he released the football. Later, he found Miller again, this time for a 46-yard touchdown.
Notre Dame was beginning to pull away, and Powlus was beginning to look like everything Irish fans had been promised.
Perhaps the most impressive sequence came just before halftime. Notre Dame got the football with only 1:30 remaining and 58 yards separating the Irish from the end zone. No problem. Powlus calmly moved the offense down the field and, with nine seconds remaining, found Ray Zellars from two yards out for his third touchdown pass of the half.
Notre Dame went to the locker room leading 21–3.
There would be no second-half letdown.
The Irish opened the third quarter with an 11-play, 65-yard drive that ended with Lee Becton scoring to make it 28–3. Later, Powlus connected with Mayes again, this time for a 36-yard touchdown.
Four touchdown passes. In his first college football game.
Notre Dame eventually finished off Northwestern, 42–15, and Powlus’s final numbers were remarkable: 18 completions in 24 attempts for 291 yards and four touchdowns. Those four touchdown passes tied a Notre Dame record shared at the time by Angelo Bertelli, Daryle Lamonica and Steve Beuerlein.
The performance immediately sent an already enormous hype machine into overdrive. Northwestern coach Gary Barnett summed it up afterward with a line that would become part of Powlus lore.
“He’s already won the Heisman.”
There was sarcasm behind it, of course.
But on that night, after what everyone had just witnessed?
It didn’t sound completely ridiculous.
And that’s the part of this game that fascinates me all these years later.
Everything was still ahead.
Notre Dame was 1–0. The Irish were ranked No. 3. Michigan was coming to Notre Dame Stadium the following week. A national championship seemed entirely possible. And Ron Powlus had played exactly one college football game.
Nobody sitting inside Soldier Field that night knew what the rest of the season would bring.
They didn’t know Notre Dame would finish 6–5–1. They didn’t know a season beginning with so much promise would become one filled with frustration and close losses. They couldn’t know how Powlus’s career would eventually be analyzed against the extraordinary expectations placed upon him before he had ever taken a college snap.
All they knew was what they had seen that night.
A young quarterback had stepped onto one of football’s grandest stages and thrown four touchdown passes. Notre Dame had won by 27 points. The Irish were undefeated.
And another season was underway.
Maybe that’s why I wanted to end my summer Throwback Thursday series here.
For the past 16 weeks, I’ve gone back through old Notre Dame football games—some famous, some forgotten, some triumphant and some downright strange. I’ve looked through old newspaper stories, revisited players and plays I hadn’t thought about in years, and remembered moments that had somehow gotten tucked away in the corners of my memory.
But somewhere along the way, I realized this series wasn’t only about football.
It was about time.
When we go back to an old football game, we aren’t simply remembering what happened on the field. We’re remembering who we were when it happened. Where we lived. Who we watched the game with. What mattered to us then. What we worried about. What we dreamed might happen next.
And in 1994, the world around those Saturdays looked very different. Nobody had a smartphone in their hand documenting every moment. There were no social media feeds delivering instant reactions to every pass, every coaching decision and every missed tackle. Saturday arrived, the game happened, and for a few hours the world became very small.
There was your team. There were the people around you. And there was whatever happened next.
We didn’t know which games would become classics. We didn’t know which players we’d still be talking about more than 30 years later. And we certainly didn’t realize how quickly all of it would become memory.
That’s one of the strange things about getting older. The moments that eventually become precious rarely announce themselves while they’re happening.
Nobody taps you on the shoulder and tells you to remember this Saturday. Remember the people sitting beside you. Remember the excitement before kickoff. Remember what it feels like to have absolutely no idea what’s coming next.
You simply assume there will be another season. Another game. Another fall. Another Saturday.
And usually there is.
But it will never be exactly this one.
There will never again be September 3, 1994, with the lights coming on at Soldier Field and Ron Powlus taking the first snaps of his college career. There will never again be that exact Notre Dame team, that exact crowd or that exact feeling that everything was still possible.
That’s why I love going back.
Not because the past was perfect. The 1994 season certainly wasn’t. And not because everything we thought might happen actually did.
Quite the opposite.
For one night in Chicago, none of that mattered because none of it had happened yet.
Notre Dame was 1–0. Ron Powlus had thrown four touchdown passes. The Irish were ranked No. 3 in America. And the whole season stretched out in front of them.
We didn’t know what was coming.
We didn’t know how quickly the years would pass.
And we didn’t know that someday we’d look back at nights like this and wish, just for a moment, that we could stand beneath those Soldier Field lights again.
Back then, it was simply another Notre Dame football Saturday. Another fall. Another beginning.
But looking back more than three decades later, there’s something wonderful about returning to that moment before we knew what came next.
Notre Dame was undefeated. A young quarterback had just delivered one of the most memorable debuts in school history. The season was still unwritten.
And for one night, everything was possible.
Cheers & GO IRISH!