“They’ll break your heart, kid.” It’s what Jimmy Fallon’s uncle told him in the movie Fever Pitch as Fallon grew up a Boston Red Sox fan.

I know the feeling of heartbreak when it comes to sports teams. I have been a fan of the Tennessee Titans since the team moved to Nashville from Houston.

I remember vividly the final play of Super Bowl XXXIV when receiver Kevin Dyson’s arm was a foot too short as the Titans literally lost the Super Bowl by the length of the football. I don’t think I have ever been more depressed after a sporting event.

My entire family didn’t really talk the entire way home from our friends’ house where we watched the game.

You can’t count on many things in the wide world of sports, but something you have been able to count on lately is the ACU Wildcats winning regular season football games. The last time the Wildcats lost a regular season game was November 7, 2009.

Sometimes the wins come easy, and sometimes, like last Thursday night against Tarleton State, the wins will push ACU fans to the emotional limit.

In case you have been living under a rock, the Cardiac ‘Cats scored a touchdown in the last minute to go ahead 27-24. Then on the last play, Wildcat cornerback Nate Bailey intercepted a potential winning touchdown pass in his own endzone to seal the win.

This win wasn’t the first like it in “the streak.” Last year, ACU pulled out two of these kind of wins. The first was a comeback win against Midwestern State at Shotwell where Mitchell Gale found running back Daryl Richardson out of the backfield to score with a little over two minutes left to preserve a 31-28 win on Homecoming afternoon.

The second thriller of the 2o1o season was maybe the best ACU game that I have ever seen. The game went back and forth, but, facing a two touchdown deficit with about 17 minutes to go, the Cats scored four touchdowns including one with a minute to go when Richardson found some running and sprinted 28 yards to the endzone.

What’s the common theme in these three close victories – other than the obvious fact that Daryl Richardson is the go-to player in crunch time? It’s that the Wildcats were resilient enough to come back and win in pressure situations.

For those of you out there that think that ACU football has been dominant forever, you would be wrong. In fact, as late as 2005, Coach Thomsen’s first season, the ‘Cats limped to a 4-6 record.

As I sat in the press box during Thursday night’s game and watched as Tarleton looked like the better team for three quarters, I was reassured by the fact that Coach T and his ‘Cats had been in this situation before and pulled it out.

Sure enough, as Bailey caught the ball and kneeled down at the two-yard line, I breathed a sigh of relief knowing that again the purple and white had made my heart race – but not break.