In fact, not even Brook's mother fully understood, McKee said, until he began sharing stories with Jan after Brook's funeral. Jan had known the McKees, who farmed near Goodland, because Brook dated Jayme in high school. But beyond that ...

"We were his getaway, and we just left it that way," Jim McKee said. "Nobody really knew about it."

Of course, the 15,000 acres of McKee land were like heaven for Brook, an avid outdoorsman.

Gathering cattle, roping steers, driving semis, running the combine, helping with wheat harvest -- Brook was part of it all on the McKee farm. He was a part of the family.

Football? A small part of the conversation, usually. But Jim McKee and Brook talked on the phone four or five times a week when Brook was in Lincoln, and those talks inevitably turned to football. When Brook learned he'd lost the starting quarterback job to Tommie Frazier before the 1995 season, he called Jim.

"There were a lot of issues with him and football," McKee said. "There were a lot of things he had a hard time dealing with."

McKee especially remembers one of Brook's last phone calls, about four days before the plane crash.

"It was basically a thank-you phone call," McKee said. "He said, 'I want you to know I love every one of you.'

"He had never, ever said anything like that before."

A medium-sized red Nebraska flag flies just above the ground of Brook's gravesite, in a cemetery on the north edge of Goodland.

The flag first appeared not long after Brook's funeral. When it eventually became torn and tattered, Jan decided to replace it. She purchased a new flag during her next Nebraska trip, but when she returned to the cemetery, the old flag had already been replaced.

Somebody has continued to replace it every year. To this day, Jan says she has no idea who. She turns to Jim McKee as she's retelling the story and asks him whether he knows. McKee shakes his head.

Jan has had strangers come to her home and stand in the front yard to take pictures of Brook's house.

"You can't live in Nebraska and not know who Brook Berringer is," said Jake McKee, who also played football at Nebraska and now lives in Omaha.

But how is Berringer remembered in his hometown?

All you will find is a poster commemorating Berringer that hangs in the trophy case at Max Jones Fieldhouse, the high school's gymnasium.

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