Prior to a team banquet at the Japan Bowl in 1989, Mark Blazek and Troy Aikman were introduced. As Blazek offered his hand and started to say something, Aikman interrupted.

“You were down,” Aikman said. “Maybe,” Blazek replied.

In the third game of that season, against UCLA at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Blazek intercepted an Aikman pass and returned it 75 yards for a touchdown. At least, officially he did.

It appeared he was down. He even hesitated for an instant. But players are coached to compete until the whistle sounds, stopping a play. And because there was no whistle, he took off.

At the time, “it didn’t seem like a big deal,” says Blazek, the president of Oak Creek Valley Bank in Valparaiso, Neb., and a major in the Army National Guard. “We lost, so it didn’t matter.”

The Cornhuskers went to California with a No. 2 national ranking and returned with a 41-28 loss against a UCLA team ranked No. 5. The game was televised nationally.

Nebraska fell behind 28-0 in the first quarter and could never recover. Blazek’s interception and return for a touchdown came with 11:44 remaining in the second quarter.

Following the season, Blazek flew to New York City to receive a scholar-athlete award presented by the National Football Foundation/Col-lege Football Hall of Fame. Nebraska sports information director Don Bryant, who accompanied him on the trip, said he would be wealthy someday if he were to get a dollar every time someone brought up the Aikman interception. And Bryant was right.

Blazek still gets questions about the play. But his journey from walk-on to starting safety is a much more interesting story, as well as evidence of the fact that you never know until you try.

That Blazek tried was a function of circumstance. Following his graduation from Raymond Central (Neb.) High School, he considered going to nearby Doane College in Crete to play football with some of his high school teammates. That would have been his choice, if he had the money.

But he figured he could afford to go to college for only one year before getting a job, and if that were the case, he might as well walk on and try to play his one season at Nebraska.

He was a reserve safety on the freshman team and missed time because of a broken ankle. That would have been the extent of his career, had he not gotten a call from a National Guard recruiter in his dorm room during first-semester finals week. A friend had given his name to the recruiter.

A National Guard enlistment solved his financial problems and allowed him to continue playing football. He had considered a service academy appointment out of high school anyway.

The plan was to take his basic training during the summer following his freshman year. But a broken wrist suffered in Nebraska’s spring game forced a delay in the training.

Instead of trying to establish himself on the depth chart during the fall of his sophomore year, he was sent to Fort Knox for basic training, armored division, tanks. Afterward, former Cornhusker linebackers coach John Melton regularly referred to him at practice as “the tank commander.”

“Let’s run it by the tank commander,” Melton would say.

Though he missed that fall, Blazek still could have redshirted, which he thought would be the case when he returned to Nebraska at mid-year. His being assigned to the “future Huskers” group rather than the regular group during the winter conditioning program solidified that belief.

He was at the bottom of the depth chart when spring practice began, behind a half-dozen other safeties. By the end of practice, however, he had worked his way to second team, and following the spring game, secondary coach George Darlington told him he wouldn’t be redshirted.

“That whole summer I thought, surely they’ll figure out they made a mistake,” says Blazek, who was probably the most anonymous second-team player on the team.

Even though top-unit players asked him where he had come from, he was a back-up to Bryan Siebler in 1986 and a regular in 1987 and 1988, playing both free and strong safety as a senior.

His National Guard unit was flexible in allowing him to meet his monthly commitment during the season by spending Sunday in drill and then making up Saturday’s drill when the football season was finished. One year, he made up the time the week of the university’s spring break.

“If not for the National Guard, I wouldn’t have played at Nebraska,” Blazek says.

He took full advantage of the educational opportunity as well, earning Academic All-America recognition as a junior and senior and receiving an NCAA postgraduate scholarship.

Having finished his undergraduate degree, he enrolled in law school, after which the Lincoln law firm for which he was a clerk hired him. He spent three years as an associate in litigation and would have continued there if not for an opportunity at Oak Creek Valley Bank, in his hometown.

He is in the legal section of the Nebraska National Guard, deputy judge advocate general.

His Guard basic training was “the best growing-up experience,” says Blazek. It convinced him that Nebraska was where he wanted to be, playing football as well as getting an education.

As a student-athlete, he learned “time management and commitment,” he says. And Coach Tom Osborne’s program reinforced his sense of “discipline, hard work and ethics.”

Blazek had the proper perspective before he decided to walk on at Nebraska. “There are two kinds of players,” he says, “ones that live for nothing but their sport and throw the rest out the window and those who realize up-front that (attitude) is a longshot. I tried to take that approach.”

The record shows that he intercepted eight passes during this career, among them the one everybody including Aikman remembers.

But there was much more to his career than that.