With the game tied up at 17 with 2.8 seconds left to go, NIU tailback Thomas Hammock couldn’t even watch as Huskie place kicker Steve Azar attempted a 42-yard field goal that would decide the game against South Florida on Thursday night.

“I heard the team screaming and I said, ‘Oh, yes! We must’ve won the game,'” said Hammock who rushed for a career-high 177 yards.

As the time expired, Azar booted the ball through the uprights.

“As soon as I kicked it, I saw it started drifting,” Azar said. “Then I looked up again and I knew right away that it was going in, and I looked down at (holder) P.J. Fleck and my first words were to him, ‘Thank you.’ He got the ball down and the rest of it was up to me, and I was just glad that I could help. I’m just glad I could contribute by putting the ball through.”

Azar had a span of 14-straight made field goals coming into this season. However, that string was snapped as he missed two field goals, both from 52-yards away, in the first 20 minutes of action.

To get Azar into position for his late game heroics, it was a team effort that almost looked like it wasn’t meant to be.

“The game wasn’t pretty,” said NIU coach Joe Novak. “We talked so much about beating ourselves and we did that in the first half. But I’ll say this for our kids, they hung in there and they came back. I thought the defense played exceptionally well in the second half and really played pretty well overall except for the first few plays.”

The first few plays Novak is referring to were two long bombs that USF laid on NIU to jump out of the blocks quickly. Two minutes and 58 seconds into the game, Bulls’ quarterback Marquel Blackwell launched a 57-yard pass to DeAndrew Rubin for a touchdown. The combination of Blackwell to Rubin hooked up for a second time to end out the first half on a 52-yard touchdown pass.

“I felt every point of the game we had control,” said USF defensive end Chris Daley. “We just made to many mental mistakes. This team wasn’t better than us.”

USF head coach Jim Leavitt countered: “I’ll disagree with Chris tonight because they won. That’s all there is to it. You play 60 minutes and you either win or lose a ball game. Joe had his team ready to go the whole time and I commend him for that. I thought NIU played a hell of a ball game and they played hard. We made too many mistakes from our standpoint, but I’m sure Northern had a lot to do with that. They got too many yards with their running game. We didn’t do a good job of stopping it.”

In particular, Leavitt is referring to the 5’10” Hammock, who carried the ball 35 times and averaged five yards a carry. In the first quarter, Hammock led an NIU charge to the Bulls end zone, where he was repeatedly handed the ball and relentlessly barreled his way through the defense. On a one-yard conversion, Hammock put the Huskies on the scoreboard almost eight minutes into the game.

Hammock’s performance is much more remarkable considering the depleted offensive line they were forced to use. Losing three players to graduation and four to injury, the running game was not expected to be the focal point of NIU’s offense.

“Coming into this game, there was a lot of questions about the offensive line,” said Hammock. “But they proved tonight that they can hold their own and I think they really stepped it up the whole night.”

Leavitt was also enamored by the leadership that NIU’s senior quarterback Chris Finlen showed in the tail end of the game.

“I thought it was impressive how [Finlen] continued to lead their offense at the end,” Leavitt said. “They really needed some momentum and that shows some maturity [of Finlen].”

“Chris Finlen kept leading us and telling us, ‘They are tired, let’s get to the line quick,'” Hammock said. “I think we all were just feeding off of Chris and we took the momentum.”

With time running down in the third quarter and NIU down 17-7, Huskie linebacker Nick Duffy capitalized on a USF fumble, handing over the torch to the NIU offense on the USF 26-yard line.

With under a minute left in the third quarter NIU inched the Huskies closer and closer to the end zone and eventually Finlen finished off the drive with a seven-yard pass to junior tight end Matt Dunker for the score, cutting the deficit to three, 17-14.

After NIU regained possession of the ball once again in the forth quarter, Azar nailed his first field goal of the game to bring the Huskies even with USF.

With a big stop of USF needed, the NIU defense came through, forcing the Bulls to punt. That’s when Hammock, Finlen and the rest of the NIU offense came in to do their damage.

“We had talked on the sideline that we could tell [USF was] a little gassed,” Finlen said. “We were trying to get in and out of the huddle and it seemed like the refs were spotting the ball quick and trying to get the game moving and we tried to use that to our advantage. We felt like we were getting the upper hand with our conditioning and being in better shape and the other team being a little tired and we used that to our advantage.”

As the Huskies marched down the field, putting Azar into position for his game-winning field goal, the entire NIU team charged the field in celebration of their first victory.

“I think as coach said, we should savor this now then look to (Saturday against Illinois in) Champaign,” said Finlen. “This win showed that our togetherness is paying off. We came through in the clutch and we haven’t done that in the past and I think that says a lot about our team.”