Hep.

In Indiana - especially in my neck of the woods - interest in football has never been what you'd consider "strong," save for an enclave up around South Bend. It took over a decade, and closer to two, for the Colts to engender passion among its fans statewide. Outside of Notre Dame, major college football in the state is a shaky proposition, as it's been almost 15 years since IU last went to a bowl game (and 40 years since its only Rose Bowl appearance), while Purdue has had occasional flashes of brilliance in its decades of mediocrity. Down south, the size of a lot of the high schools (like those in my area), not to mention the expense of fielding a team, preclude them from doing so. The state sporting landscape begins and, for a lot of people, ends with basketball.

It is into this environment that Terry Hoeppner stepped when he came to IU in 2005 - his "dream job," he said! - to try to breathe life into a moribund football program (a program that was in such bad shape that it couldn't even make a bowl with All-Everything Antwaan Randle El calling the signals). People chuckled when, at his introductory news conference, Hoeppner placed a single rose in a glass bowl to symbolize his ambition of returning the Hoosiers to the Rose Bowl. "Not at this school, not in this conference," the naysayers said. "Rose Bowl? Heh. Do they still have the Poulan Weed-Eater Independence Bowl?"

And I was among them. Save for a few years in the late '80s, when Anthony Thompson was breaking records and IU was at least competing with Michigan and Ohio State, IU has never been considered a world-beater in football, and the best that they've often been able to hope for was third or fourth place in the conference. Usually, the results were worse than that; the Hoosiers have been prone, every couple of years, to laying an egg in a big game and getting destroyed. Even as recently as last season, when the Hoosiers had an opportunity to make a bowl game by winning but one of their last three games, they gave up 63 points to an awful Minnesota team, which was the closest thing to a "gimmie" that they had left on their schedule. And then, not unexpectedly, they lost to Michigan and put up a good fight before falling short against Purdue.

But - the Minnesota anomaly aside - you could sense a change in the program. I said in this space after IU's upset of Iowa last year:

In spite of the fact that Coach Hep will have them taking the field believing they can win, they'll take their beating against top-ranked Ohio State this weekend.

And they did. But the important thing was this: There is no doubt the IU team that took the field against Ohio State believed that they could compete against the Buckeyes' All-World athletes, even if the rest of the world didn't. It sounds too Hollywood, sure. But Hoeppner was a dreamer. He had huge dreams, and his team, his university, his community, his state were buying into those dreams.

What an inspiration, really. Optimism? Surrounding IU football? What, are you smoking crack???

If you've been following the story, though, you know that Coach Hoeppner wasn't doing well. He was diagnosed with a brain tumor in late 2005, and had two surgeries over the last 18 months. The saga took an ominous turn earlier this month, when IU's athletic director expressed "concern" about Hoeppner's current medical leave, and the fact that he hadn't even made a public appearance for months.

Last Friday, the university elevated one of the team's assistants to interim head coach for 2007 to give Hoeppner more time to (ideally) heal - if you were any bit of a realist, though, you had a gnawing feeling that for all of his fight and his spirit, Hoeppner probably wouldn't be back on the sidelines. The implication from the AD was that Hoeppner's brain cancer had returned.

Terry Hoeppner passed away this morning at 59.

Coach Hoeppner meant a lot more to other people than he did to me - I was only a fan - but my hands are shaking as I type this. A lot of people will couch his death strictly in football terms - "What a tragic loss for the IU football program; he really had things turned around there" - but when you consider what a great person he seemed to be, infusing everything he touched with an indefatigable sense of optimism and positivity, you realize that his loss is bigger than football. My condolences to everyone near him - his family, his team, his colleagues.