They caught lightning in a bottle for 10 weeks - 10 Saturdays of sweet and seductive success that no University of New Mexico football team has known.

There aren't any stadium plaques to mark their victories, no bowl trophy to gather around for pictures at the reunion. Hell, no reunions, period.

Not big ones, anyway.

All that lingers are a few filaments of fragile recollections, easily snapped or altered by the 25 years that separate then and now.

"It's been so long," said Joe Lee Dunn, the Lobos' defensive coordinator and one of the prime architects of a season that - like lightning - flashed brilliantly, blindingly, and then went away.

The Lobos of 1982 can tell you two things with any certitude.

They triumphed in 10 games that season, more than any Lobos team in history.

They were damned good.

"We won 10 ballgames, all because we had a bunch of average guys who just had a hatred of losing," said Kelly Wilson, a nose guard on what might be the best football team New Mexico's had.

"We'd do anything to win," he added. "We had a loose kind of thread that wound through that whole team. It didn't matter if you were the scholarly type, the fighting type, the church type. The thread that held it together was that you played together."

They came from places like Lynwood, Long Beach and Los Angeles in California; Austin, Amarillo and El Paso in Texas; Santa Fe, Gallup and Las Cruces closer to home. They'd been standouts at Eldorado High in Albuquerque and Eldorado High in Eldorado, Ark. Only one had been on Notre Dame's recruiting list.

They ran a quick-strike veer offense with an underrated quarterback and a blitzaholic defense that featured swarms of carnivorous linebackers and safeties.

The coaches were from the Gritz Belt - mostly southerners with drawls so thick you'd need a hatchet to cut through the simplest of their commands. And yet, the head coach - a quiet hell-raiser who said not much of anything - held court with his intimidating, almost frightening silence.

"It was a strange team," said Don Elliott, a starting offensive lineman that season. "We really weren't that talented. It's not like we had a lot of All-Americans. But everything we did worked. We had the right offensive and defensive strategies. Our schedule lined up better - we didn't play Utah, and we didn't have `money' games (on the road against top 10 opponents). We just had fun."

Added Albuquerque's Steve Sauter, then a safety: "We didn't have a lot of individual stars, but we jelled as a team. We did what we were supposed to do. And if everyone does that, well . . ."

New Mexico football hasn't exactly cross-referenced with the word luck over the years, and in an odd way, '82 was no different. The Lobos' lone loss that season kept them from a conference championship, and their final win - a lightly attended home game that sent fan-conscious bowl scouts scurrying for cover - probably kept them from experiencing post-season play.

There is something unfortunate and unfinished about it all - the lack of a galvanizing memory or a reason to gather every year.

Still, even a quarter-century later, still visible even after the flash drifted away, there's something about that team.

The Spirit of '82.

Never before. Maybe never again.

"Abra-abra-cadabra

I want to reach out and grab ya . . ."

- "Abracadabra"

Steve Miller

The people who took New Mexico to 10-1 didn't enter the season with a lot of evidence that they'd be so good. The Lobos opened the '80s at 8-14-1 during Joe Morrison's first two seasons as head coach.

But beneath that crust of mediocrity were buds of hope. Under Dunn, the hard-charging Patton to Morrison's analytical Eisenhower, UNM's defense had become a hurricane of movement and violence that descended on unhappy quarterbacks.

Upon arriving in Albuquerque in 1980, Morrison and Dunn had begun making the college football world talk about a strange potion of blitzing and pressure that forever changed the Western Athletic Conference, then the nation's pre-eminent throwing league.

They announced their presence in Morrison's first game in Albuquerque, destroying lordly Brigham Young and its mouthy quarterback, Jim McMahon, in a shocking 25-21 victory to open the 1980 season.

"You ask me about the 1982 team, but the game I remember most was that one," said Jake Simpson, a linebacker. "It was the most exciting college game I ever played in."

Injuries, however, unraveled Morrison's fine start in '80, and poor offensive production had shackled the 1981 team. No one knew what '82 would portend, but most understood the defense, at least, was set.

Dunn's blitzing was based on the contributions of many, but focused on the talents of three - Ray Hornfeck, an undersized safety from Tucson; Jimmie Carter of Austin, a devastating hitter at linebacker; Johnny Jackson, another marauding linebacker from Los Angeles. As a team, the '82 Lobos had an incredible 53 quarterback sacks, a school record that has not been challenged since.

None of the big three had been highly recruited. Jackson was just 5-foot-10. Hornfeck, who somehow played quarterback and nose guard in high school, stood on a scale for his recruiting visit and weighed 157 pounds. Together, however, they were devastating.

"Those two guys (Jackson and Hornfeck) were the epitome of what it was all about," said Dunn, now a high school coach in Memphis, Tenn.

All that remained was fixing the offense, and Morrison found a willing savior in Frank Sadler, who'd worked with him at a previous stop at Tennessee-Chattanooga.

In his first and only year at New Mexico, Sadler, effervescent and efficient, brought a run-oriented, split-back veer to the Lobos. Most coaches in today's game look at the veer the way '07 NASCAR drivers view a 1967 Impala, but Sadler's group ran it nearly to perfection by blending depth, quickness and smarts.

The credit for that probably goes to a quiet Texan named David Osborn, a quarterback whose first three years at UNM had been solid, though nothing spectacular.

In '82, Osborn was reborn. He threw for 1,609 yards and 15 touchdowns, while running for another 539 yards. His play sparked a team-only nickname: the Wizard of Oz.

"He just did a wonderful job dealing the ball when it needed to be dealt," said Sadler, now retired and living in Alabama.

Kelly Wilson put it more succinctly.

"David Osborn is the best quarterback in UNM history, hands down," he said. "He was just a master."

It didn't hurt Osborn that New Mexico had, yes, a Parade All-American at running back.

That would be Mike Carter, a speedy Sandia High standout in the late 1970s whose speed had made him one of the nation's top recruits. But once in college, Carter's career had been buffeted by academic bounces and injury troubles.

Finally healthy in his senior year, Carter had an excellent season. He wasn't the program savior that many had hoped for or expected, but his 722 yards in '82 - on just 107 carries - led the way in a monumentally deep backfield that included Michael Johnson (650 yards), Osborn, Denny Allen (426) and Carl Raven (322).

"Mike (Carter) was such a solid person all around," said tight end Mike Mazzella. "I never saw him down. Everyone on the team would want to race him. They were nuts. He would have just eaten lunch, and people would go in the parking lot just to run against him. But he was one of the most natural athletes I ever saw. They never won."

The parade of Carter, Osborn, Johnson, Allen and Raven pretty much added up to create an All-American backfield - one that, oddly, could envision its Saturday stardom days ahead of time.

Mazzella said Sadler, ever the motivator, would ask KKOB radio broadcaster Mike Roberts to create fictitious tapes of UNM running its plays days before the game actually was played.

"(Roberts) would announce the game," said Mazzella, now an Allstate insurance agent in Albuquerque, "and we would sit in a dark room and visualize it."

Seeing became believing. Believing became a habit.

The Lobos opened '82 with a 41-20 win over Wyoming in Laramie. Down 10-0 early, UNM linebacker Jake Simpson turned the game around with an interception return for a touchdown.

The rest was left to the offense, and Osborn and Carter delivered, victimizing Wyoming's new defensive coordinator - a fellow by the name of Long. Rocky Long.

Now the Lobos head coach, Long said he doesn't remember much about the game. But he does recall the era - he'd worked as a Morrison assistant in 1980 and had helped recruit some of the UNM players who became stars in '82.

"I thought coach Morrison had great rapport with the players," Long said. "He demanded that they work hard; demanded that they be disciplined. He did put a lot of personal responsibility on players - it was their job to learn and execute well.

"But he never got overly excited one way or the other," Long said. "He was even tempered, low-key."

The Lobos came to mirror their coach: Methodically, their defense set the table with turnovers and big plays. Just as routinely, the offense gobbled on the goodies.

UNM shut out longtime tormentor Texas Tech in Game 2, and a couple weeks later outgunned Air Force 49-37 in perhaps one of the great games a New Mexico team has played on the road.

That set the stage for a mid-season showdown at home against BYU, which had deeded itself the Western Athletic Conference champion for nearly a decade.

The Lobos suffered a couple of questionable officiating calls - memory eludes most of them on exactly where the refs may have screwed up - but their biggest problem was turnovers and a left-handed sorcerer at quarterback named Steve Young.

Result: A 40-12 Cougars victory and the end of the Lobos' undefeated season.

But unlike other UNM teams, this one kept chugging. New Mexico hammered opponents with skill, and occasionally tricked them with luck. A late-season, 20-17 victory over lightly regarded North Texas State came only because receiver Derwin Williams made a miraculous catch of an Osborn heave with 28 seconds remaining.

By mid-November, New Mexico was 9-1, and a bowl game - the school's first since 1961 - seemed a certainty. All that remained was a home game against Hawaii before a national television audience on WTBS.

Under new stadium lights installed specifically for the occasion, the Lobos handled the Rainbow Warriors with ease, winning 41-17.

Their fans handled it with a yawn. Only 23,028 showed up.

It cost the Lobos' program like no other single game in history.

"You turn me out, you turn me on, you turned me loose

Then you turned me wrong

You dropped a bomb on me, baby

You dropped a bomb on me . . ."

- "You Dropped a Bomb on Me"

the Gap Band

Bowl games aren't the devalued trinkets they are today. There was no BCS, few conference tie-ins, fewer bowl invitations, period. Getting in was competitive business in a way that only accountants - not safeties or tight ends - could calculate.

Turned off by the paltry support for a 10-1 team, ranked No. 20 in the nation, all the Lobos' bowl chances went away. The Bluebonnet. The All-American. The Aloha. The Independence.

"I realize it more now, at age 47, then I did then," said Jake Simpson. "It truly was an injustice. A slap in the face."

"It was a slap in the face is what it was," Dunn echoed, a half-continent away. "We really should have been going and in the system we have nowadays, there's no telling where we'd have went.

"That's the way it goes, and you can't worry about it. But it probably helped (Morrison) make up his mind to go to South Carolina."

Ah, yes, South Carolina.

His friends today say that Morrison liked New Mexico, but the lack of deep and wide fan support in Albuquerque - especially during a 10-1 season - convinced him there were greener (ahem) pastures.

There were. Morrison wasted no time in heading to South Carolina and a stadium that fans had no trouble filling.

Then-Lobos Athletics Director John Bridgers moved quickly, naming Dunn as UNM's head coach. But Sadler and most of Morrison's staff departed for Columbia, and JoeMo's mojo - the alchemy of the right coaches and the right players at the right time - was gone. Never to return.

Some people in Albuquerque talk about Morrison's what-might-have-beens the way Camelot-lovers think of JFK. If only he'd stayed, fallen in love with the city, built the program for the long haul.

Truth is, few coaches really stay for any length of time. And Dunn says Morrison understood the limitations here at the time - a basketball-centric community, an aging if not already outdated football complex, few in-state recruits from which to build a real core.

More importantly, maybe Morrison knew something else: There weren't a lot of 1982s to be had in Albuquerque. History says he's right - only twice in the next 25 years has New Mexico won eight games or more.

"Oh yeah, life goes on

Long after the thrill of livin' is gone . . ."

- "Jack and Diane"

John Mellencamp

Seasons come and go so quickly, especially in the lives of young men who play ball and the older men who coach them.

Morrison, who had a history of heart trouble but never let it keep him from smoking, died of a heart attack at the age of 51 in 1989. By that time, he'd led South Carolina to the same kind of success he'd experienced at New Mexico and Tennessee-Chattanooga.

At the time of his death, Dunn had joined his old chum in Columbia, S.C. Frustrated by UNM's inability to upgrade its football plant from the early-'60s model that lingered until about 10 years ago, Dunn resigned from UNM in 1986 to take his place beside Morrison as South Carolina's defensive coordinator.

Soon after '82, the Lobos football program fell back into football perdition - it didn't experience another winning season until 1993.

The players, as players often do, spread to the four winds. Kicker Pete Parks, the best eater on the team at 145 pounds, still does Dunn's taxes and lives in the south. Jake Simpson, a father of 11, runs a ministry in San Diego, and was the officiant when his old teammate, Wilson, got married. David Osborn is a fire fighter in Fort Worth. Sauter, Elliott and many others stuck around Albuquerque.

Hornfeck left town and runs a business in Tucson. He has knee problems now, though not from college football. He also has a 10-month-old son whose crib is full of Lobos gear. Dad says, only half kiddingly, that he can't wait for his boy to play in "the Rose Bowl" for his alma mater.

They've never had an official reunion for the team; a halftime ceremony to remember 1982 has never been organized by UNM.

About the closest they come are gatherings of small groups, like the yearly reunion of the fun-loving "Solid 5" - close friends Tim Lopez, Donnie DeYoung of the offensive line, Hornfeck, Mazzella and running back Mark Mathiasmeier. They made the paper in Tucson last month when Mathiasmeier bagged a hole-in-one before the Arizona-New Mexico game.

The fact that UNM has yet to recognize the '82 Lobos bothers some of them, but they don't complain too much. They know what they did.

And once in a while, it comes back. More than a few have the team picture on a wall in their study. They think about the past, the laughs, the wins.

They were really good.

"I have a moment in time," said Hornfeck, still as eager to talk football as he was 25 years ago. "I remember running out on the field and coach Dunn is already on the sideline. . . . I'm jumping up and down, really excited, and he comes up to me and says: `Remember this time. You will remember this moment for the rest of your life.' "