Does anybody remember what they were doing on the night of Oct. 24, 2025? It’s OK if you don’t exactly remember, it’s a pretty innocuous date on the calendar. A Google search on events that happened that day won’t provide too many interesting results, unless you live in Ireland, where they had a presidential election.
I can tell you what I was doing that day. I watched as NU men’s soccer went to Ann Arbor and played the Wolverines extremely close in a 2-1 loss. The Wildcats led that game for 34 minutes
thanks to an Aaron O’Reilly strike in the 31st minute. But a through ball to Grayson Elmquist in the 65th minute and an 87th-minute penalty given away by Fritz Volmar gave the No. 13 Wolverines a Friday night victory.
It was a tough ending without a doubt. Michigan was ranked at the time, and it would have been NU’s first conference win in over a month. The ‘Cats were 0-2-2 in the four attempts leading up to it. Had I been writing this column last year, you can imagine my weekly titles would have been of the doom and gloom variety.
The thing is, these games usually come with unspoken promises attached to them. Once you push a ranked team to the brink on the road, fans naturally expect a certain level of play from the team thereon out. This is not a new concept at all. It’s why upsets oftentimes feel so monumental; keep playing like that and after enough time those wins go from being major upsets to within expectations.
But playing well doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things. Rather, it’s not the most important thing. Results are more important than how they are earned. Most people, if prompted, would agree with that take. But in practice it’s hard not to conflate the two. One assumes that positive, possession-based play will lead to results, and thus they glorify teams like Spain, Barcelona and Man City. But the Broncos were the one seed in the AFC last year and the masses never took them seriously at any point in the season because the offense rarely wowed you outside of the fourth quarter. Most assumed that style of play could not consistently get wins, and thus discounted a team that was a game and a quarterback injury away from the Super Bowl.
I only bring this up because Saturday’s game felt nearly identical to the one that took place on Oct. 24, 2025. This time Northwestern led for 64 minutes, going up one to the good thanks to Aaron O’Reilly (again) before NU failed to cover its markers on a corner and a late penalty given away by Josue Pfrommer gave the No. 14 Huskies a late victory.
A year has passed. It would be very easy to feel hard done by because the level of play in this game heavily resembled last year’s, while the result objectively is the same as last year (even if you don’t want to compare this game to last year’s Michigan one, the ‘Cats lost by one to Washington as well last season). But that’s only if you’re focusing specifically on this one performance.
Results-wise for the season, NU is currently sitting at exactly .500, and reaching last year’s record (8-6-3) might be a tall task. But the B1G is much more difficult this year, and the ‘Cats arguably underperformed in conference play last year. NU got six points against Michigan State, Rutgers, Penn State and Ohio State last season, three teams that were unranked and finished in the bottom four of the conference. This year, all of those teams bar Penn State have been ranked at some point in the season. I don’t think expecting the same six points from those fixtures is fair. Then you account for the rest of the ranked teams on the schedule; matching last year’s B1G win total of three would be a good season by most accounts.
I said that results matter, but the context behind them is just as important. The schedule is much harder. If NU found three more wins in this upcoming gauntlet and matched last year’s record, I’d be over the moon. I don’t think last year’s team would have produced any better results than this team has thus far. The style of play has been very up and down. In the first half of this game I saw NU players throwing themselves into blocks and defending well in the 18-yard box. I don’t think the defensive pitfalls are a matter of ability as much as they are a matter of concentration. It took 80 minutes for NU’s concentration to break; when they were dialed in, Washington didn’t have answers. This season has also had some of the “unspoken promise” flavored wins as well. Maryland, Michigan, even the UIC games all had good things about them.
At the end of the day, I started writing this week’s installment feeling extremely frustrated after a one-goal loss on the road against the national champs. That kind of loss shouldn’t warrant a “sky is falling down” reaction. The fact that I even feel this way is a good indicator of NU’s quality.
Now if the ‘Cats get anything less than a win this Friday vs. Penn State, next week’s column will have a much different tone. I hardly imagine that will be the case.
