Indiana Football: Old Oaken Bucket victory brings 2019 season full circle
By Alec Lasley
The Indiana football program capped off its 2019 regular season in fashion with a double-overtime thriller against Purdue.
The 2019 college football season for the Indiana football program is down to just one game, but it’s a game that the Hoosiers haven’t played in since 2016. While the program looks ahead to the bowl game in its future, the way the regular season ended was more than just ‘another win’ and the reaction following the game proved it.
Yes, the Old Oaken Bucket rivalry is always more than just a game on the schedule and always bares more weight than one of Northwestern or Maryland, but this season just showed that this game in 2019 was not like the ones in the past.
The Hoosiers secured their eighth win of the 2019 season, a first since 1993, after taking down Purdue in a thrilling game on Saturday, one that shouldn’t have even gotten to overtime. It looked like all of the Indiana teams in the past; one that was ‘oh so close’. After two straight weeks of failing to see a win, it looked as though a third straight loss was on the way and a fabulous 2019 season would turn into another season of ‘what-if’s’.
Except this time it wasn’t. Indiana found a way to win and bring the entire 2019 season full circle, a season that will go down as one of the best seasons in program history. One win usually doesn’t have that much sway, but the struggles that Indiana has seen recently, and the patience that head coach Tom Allen has preached, finally paid off.
The season started with a lot of expectations and hope, hope that this would finally be the year that Indiana broke through and went from a team that was a couple of years away, to a team that had arrived.
When the Hoosiers were slowly letting the game get away from them on Saturday, it was once again hope that crept into people’s mind, almost willing Indiana to victory when it looked all but lost.
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A season in which the Hoosiers found the top-25 for the first time since 1994, an eight win season for the first time since 1993, best start to the season since 1993, and a bowl game for the first time since 2016, hope has now turned into expectation moving forward, but first the first bowl victory since 1991 awaits them, the final chapter of this memorable 2019 college football season.