Falling in overtime to Iowa.

Losing on a field goal with five seconds remaining against Michigan.

And the latest addition, a five-yard touchdown pass with six seconds remaining to propel No. 18 Nebraska (7-2 overall, 4-1 Big Ten) over the Spartans (5-5, 2-4) 28-24 Saturday night at Spartan Stadium.

It comes as little surprise after the most recent gut-wrenching loss that, by all accounts, heartbreak doesn’t get any easier the fourth time around.

A number of players said Saturday was the worst of what has been a devastating six weeks, with four conference losses in the game’s final minute, and with a combined 10-point margin of defeat.

Head coach Mark Dantonio regularly urges his team to look forward, saying that wondering what could have been serves no one, but it’s hard not to view this season as a year of what might have been.

This season has become such an emotional roller coaster, it’s tough not to have vertigo from the Spartans’ constant last-second high-wire act.

Maybe it’s retribution for all the late-game bounces that have gone MSU’s way the past two years.
Maybe it’s the team’s relative inexperience in closing out the tough games.

Or maybe the Football Gods simply are against this team, a theory junior quarterback Andrew Maxwell isn’t convinced of.

“I don’t know about that,” Maxwell said.
“It’s execution. It’s finishing, and that’s the way the game goes. It’s the details, it’s the inches, and that just shows how important the whole game is and how important every single play is. So we can’t point fingers at imaginary football deities. It stops right here.”

And right now, this football team is getting a brutally tough lesson in the school of hard knocks.
MSU began the year without a quarterback on its roster who had recorded a start and without a receiver who had totalled 100 receiving yards the year before.

Junior receiver Bennie Fowler, the Spartans’ second-leading receiver this season and one of the offense’s most experienced players before the year, said he played more snaps in the team’s first three games than he had in his previous three years on campus combined.

They’ve started a different offensive line six times, and had a kicker miss seven field goals, more than all but one Big Ten kicker this season, and as many as he had missed the previous three years combined.

Everything that could have gone wrong has, and instead of fighting for a conference title in the season’s final two games the way MSU has the previous two years, it will be a battle just to become bowl-eligible.

It’s a struggle few could have imagined before the season began, staring up from second-to-last place in the Legends Division standings in week 11, preseason goals no longer in front of them, and only two games to go.

“You just have to be able to keep pushing,” Dantonio said. “I don’t know what else to say about it. Just keep working.”