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LINCOLN — So you thought Nebraska women's basketball had its 15 minutes of fame? Thought Connie Yori and the ladies would fall back to earth and never be heard from again?

Think again. Two years after that season of seasons — 32-2, Big 12 championship, No. 1 seed, NCAA Sweet 16 — the Huskers are 19-3 and half a game out of first place in the Big Ten.

This program is made of Teflon. Actually, it was built with brick, mortar and sweat. It's built to last. Tough.

Small wonder why.

It starts at the top, where the matriarch of the program leads by example, from the bench, the hospital bed or on crutches.

Connie Yori is one tough lady. Last September, she found out how tough.

The fluke over at the Devaney Center wasn't the 2010-11 season. It was what happened to Yori after she had what she thought was a routine arthroscopic surgery on her left knee last August.

It came from an old ACL injury she suffered during her Creighton playing days in 1985. She's going to have the knee replaced soon. That will be a piece of cake compared to what happened last fall.

Soon after the surgery, Yori developed a staph infection in her left knee. That was the beginning of a month-long personal hell.

"One out of 10,000 people get staph infections after surgery," Yori said. "I just got unlucky."

She soon found out that was putting it lightly.

"The staph infection knocked me out," Yori said. "I was not only in the hospital, I was really sick. I did not feel like myself. I got weak. I didn't have energy. I couldn't do what I normally do."

And that presented an entirely different problem.

"I couldn't move my knee and I didn't move it for a month," Yori said. "Then I got a blood clot."

She was in serious, serious pain. How much? Yori put it in terms that only women could understand.

"I've had a child," Yori said. "The pain I felt in my knee was 10 times worse."

She spent a month at St. Elizabeth Regional Medical Center and Madonna Rehabilitation Hospital in Lincoln. When October rolled around, she missed the first two weeks of practice.

That's when her players knew something was wrong.

"I've never seen her take a day off," junior Lindsey Moore said. "And we didn't see her for a couple of months. So you knew it was something serious."

Yori made an appearance at the grand opening of the new basketball facility. Barely.

"I was very weak at that time," Yori said. "I was in a lot of pain there. Every time I moved my knee, even a quarter of an inch, I felt like someone was stabbing me with a knife. They had me on pain meds.

"It's weird, because I don't consider myself a wimp. People would visit me in the hospital. You try to fake through it."

Her family and players knew better. Moore said Yori "always tells it like it is." Except maybe this time.

"We went to visit her in the hospital and you could tell she was in a lot of pain, just how she looked and sounded," Moore said. "She kept apologizing for it, which I thought was kind of funny. She kept saying, 'I'll be fine.' We knew she wasn't."

That was the sort of attitude, though, that has kept Yori's program on track. It took her eight years to build a champion. There were ups and downs in recruiting. Nebraska women's hoops is no easier sell than the men's program. Yori slowly built depth. She got lucky on a couple of players nobody else saw, including Kelsey Griffin.

The crescendo was 2009-10. And people wondered if that was a one-hit wonder. Then came the fall last season, 13-18 overall and 3-13 in the final Big 12 season. Well, so much for that, some critics said. Yori knew better.

"We hoped last year was more of a blip than the norm," Yori said. "Two years ago, we were pretty dominant. Last year, we started the year with eight guards and finished the year with two. We had a bunch of injuries.

"We had to go zone and that's been a four-letter word for me. We could not practice. We didn't have enough people."

This year, they're back with a vengeance, with a schedule full of new opponents. The Big Ten may not be as stout as the Big 12, but an 8-2 start says something.

What it says is that Yori is on top of her game recruiting — she starts two true freshmen. Two of her starting five, Jordan Hooper (Alliance) and Emily Cady (Seward), are in-state kids. It says her program is strong enough to win in the Big 12 or Big Ten. It also says they're healthy.

"Here's the deal: You have to have good players to win," Yori said. "I don't care if you're John Wooden. If you don't have good players, you're not going to win. Some years you're going to have them and some years you'll get the injury bug.

"When you get hit with injuries at Nebraska, it's not like we have 10 All-Americans. It's not like we're UConn, where they can just insert another All-American when someone goes out. We haven't historically had great players. We're not getting the top 10, top 15 recruit to come to Nebraska. So you have to stay healthy."

What this season's start also says is the lady can coach. Those who've followed Yori's career from Creighton knew that. They also knew she was tough. But maybe nobody, even Yori, knew how tough until this season.

"Big deal, it was a couple months of my life," Yori said. "When you consider what I had versus other people I saw in the hospital, someone who was in a car accident with a head injury or someone with cancer, it was nothing. You could see babies hooked up on tubes. Can you imagine as a parent having to deal with that?

"This was nothing. A blip in my life."

And the only blip you'll see around her program.

Contact the writer:

402-444-1025, tom.shatel@owh.com

twitter.com/tomshatelOWH

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