Wow, what a game.

My jaw dropped open four or five times. I felt like my computer chair was a seesaw as I watched NIU slug it out at the Glass Bowl against Toledo.

The end result?

The Huskies prevailed 63-60 over the Rockets in a frenetic game.

At first, I thought I was dreaming as TommyLee Lewis ran in the first two Rockets kickoffs for touchdowns, and finally after a first quarter tsunami of points, I stopped pinching myself. It was real.

The next three quarters did resemble a dream, if only an offensive one. Points were oozing out of the scoreboard as players scored touchdowns and kicked field goals at will. The stats were astronomical.

Momentum swung in violent bursts from side to side as both the Rockets’ and Huskies’ defenses were doing their best to imitate what Swiss cheese would look like if it played on a football field.

A porous Toledo secondary helped NIU’s passing game get off the gurney as Chandler Harnish threw for more than one touchdown for the first time in three games and went over 200 yards passing for just the fourth time in nine games. Nathan Palmer caught three of those passes for touchdowns and had 104 yards receiving.

Where was the NIU defense though? Toledo is a tough team, but NIU keeps pulling this Jekyll and Hyde side show with its defense – which was supposedly getting over the hump – every time it plays on the road.

Toledo’s offensive line created huge holes for its running backs Adonis Thomas and David Fluellen to run through, although all either back had to do once they got to the second level was juke right or left. From there, an NIU defender would go flying by.

Toledo wide receiver Eric Page victimized NIU’s secondary for five touchdowns, once going untouched by defenders on a touchdown that was called back.

The tackling was so bad, had NIU lost, one might wonder it could have protested the game in an effort to investigate whether or not Toledo had sprayed down its jerseys with butter.

The Huskies didn’t lose, however, and strange as it may seem, we can thank the Huskies defense for that.

Early in the fourth quarter, on third and eight, NIU’s Kyle Jenkins batted down an Austin Dantin pass that held Toledo to a field goal and stopped the team twice on two point conversions that would have tied the game.

Had Toledo gotten that first down and scored even one of those two point conversions, it would have surely won the game.

NIU can’t always keep surviving like this, but if its offense keeps putting up 63 points a game, it might not really matter anyway.