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There were two poignant hugs Tuesday afternoon on the tarmac that meant more than any game and spoke louder than the neon-orange-glittered signs held by fans, celebrating the team's 41-38 overtime victory over Stanford.
First, Shelley Budke stepped off the plane to a team full of Cowgirls basketball players who were eager to embrace her as they boarded a separate team flight for this week's game in Lubbock against Texas Tech University.
Budke is the wife of OSU women's basketball coach Kurt Budke, who was killed in a November plane crash along with an assistant, Miranda Serna, and OSU boosters and pilots Olin and Paula Branstetter.
The other hug happened between football coach Mike Gundy and Jim Littell, Kurt Budke's one-time assistant and best friend, who was chosen to continue Budke's work as head coach for Cowgirls basketball.
They exchanged a quick hug and congratulations, then Littell headed to board his team's plane and Gundy hauled off his own luggage and headed home.
It was Gundy who awarded Monday night's game ball to Shelley Budke in honor of her late husband and those lost in the plane crash.
A sweet gesture, highly symbolic for two OSU teams whose fates seemed tragically intertwined this season.
The reason the football team was returning Tuesday from a game in Glendale, Ariz., and not headed to New Orleans to play in the national championship game later this week was a single loss: Nov. 18, a narrow defeat in double overtime to unranked Iowa State.
The plane crash that killed Budke, Serna and the Branstetters happened a day earlier.
"We'll never know what would have been," fan Karri Adams said.
"This season has been happy and sad."
Adams drove from Edmond just to see the team deplane at the Stillwater Regional Airport, sporting a black shirt with orange lettering: "My heroes have always been Cowboys."
Lee Cannon of Stillwater attended every home game and waited at the airport for the team's arrival after every away game this season.
He's a die-hard, orange-bleeding Cowboys fan who waited almost 60 years for a season like this, he said.
He would have preferred to see his Cowboys get a shot at the top-ranked Louisiana State University Tigers, he said, but as someone who can remember seasons with only one victory - instead of only one loss - he's grateful.
"I'm real proud of them," Cannon said. "To go win the Fiesta Bowl and beat the Sooners in the same season? It doesn't get any better than that."
One of the biggest cheers from the crowd gathered at the airport came when quarterback Brandon Weeden, the force behind so much of the team's success this season, stepped off the plane.
He smiled and signed footballs and hats for at least 20 minutes after landing, taking pictures with fans who hope to root for him in the NFL soon.
He was still signing and taking pictures as the Cowgirls basketball team's plane took off in the distance.
The pilot had reportedly delayed takeoff by a few minutes specifically so they could see the football team, who landed a few minutes ahead of schedule.
Weeden signed an orange cap for Harsha Desilva, who came to OSU in 1996 to study engineering, mostly clueless about football, having grown up in Sri Lanka.
Now, he's a die-hard fan who happens to work in Stillwater and happily asked his boss if he could sneak out for a bit to greet the team plane.
"I told my boss, and he said: 'Go. We've got to support our team,'" Desilva said.
Original Print Headline: Fans welcome OSU team home
Cary Aspinwall 918-581-8477
cary.aspinwall@tulsaworld.com
Source: http://www.tulsaworld.com/site/articlepath.aspx?articleid=20120104_11_A11_ULNSka483439&rss_lnk=2
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