One of my favorite newspaper headlines of all time — because it took something extraordinarily stunning and world-changing, and made it sound utterly matter-of-fact — is from the front-page New York Times “news analysis” the day after Mikhail Gorbachev’s resignation. The headline: “The Soviet State, Born of a Dream, Dies.”
Obviously, nothing in the world of sports can match that. But, thinking analogically here, the seismic events that are unfolding before our eyes are, within the context of college athletics, sort of like a miniature version of the breakup of the Soviet Union, no? Anyway, I was reminded of that old Times headline by this epic ESPN lede:
With Nebraska apparently headed to the Big Ten, the Pac-10 is poised to become the Pac-16.
File that under “stunningly matter-of-fact summations of things that sound utterly implausible, but are now, amazingly, true.”
UPDATE: Or not? 
RT @SPORTSbyBROOKS: NU Regents Chairman: No Big 10 invitation – ‘Reports are inaccurate’ / UT, NU coaches: No Big 10 briefings http://bit.ly/bt0klK