A sold-out, emotionally charged Kyle Field crowd. An unbeaten opponent with the inside track to the national championship. An upset-minded Texas A&M squad with plenty to prove, but nothing to lose. And members of A&M's 1939 national championship team on hand to provide further inspiration to the current Aggies.

This weekend's Texas A&M-Nebraska game has all the elements of a classic. Ironically -- perhaps even eerily -- it also has virtually all the same elements of the Aggies' season finale in 1963.

Thirty-five years ago, in one of the more memorable games in Kyle Field's history, the Aggies came excruciatingly close to pulling off one of the most monumental upsets in a century of Texas A&M football. Drawing inspiration from a capacity crowd, a lack of respect, a national television audience and the words from members of A&M's lone national title team, the Aggies came within one extremely questionable call of derailing the No. 1-ranked Texas Longhorns.

The Horns narrowly escaped College Station with a 15-13 victory and went on to beat Navy to earn the school's first national championship. But perhaps the officiating crew from that A&M-Texas battle deserved national title rings, as well.

One apparently bad call by the referees preserved Texas' title hopes and destroyed A&M's improbable upset bid --Êa fact that still haunts A&M's 1963 players even today.

"I can't even begin to tell you how many times I've replayed that game in my mind," said Ronnie Moore, a key lineman on the '63 team. "And to this day, I really think we beat them. That call, it was horrible. The film clearly showed his knees hit a yard in the end zone. Had we lost fair and square, that's one thing. But to have it taken away, it was hard to live with that."

A WEEK OF MIXED EMOTIONS

In the days leading up to the 1963 Thanksgiving Day showdown between the Aggies and Longhorns, there was some discussion regarding the possibility of postponing the game. On Nov. 22, less than six days before kickoff, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.

The entire nation mourned and directed much of its scorn toward the Lone Star State.

"The country was in shock," said Jim Keller, the Aggies' quarterback and safety. "The assassination was on everyone's mind, and there was some talk about playing the game at a later time. Eventually, it was decided to play the game as scheduled, but we honored the situation by not lighting Bonfire."

While the Bonfire stack never went up in flames, the arrival of several former A&M legends certainly lit a fire under the Aggie players. A few days before the Texas game, several members of A&M's 1939 national championship team arrived in College Station, hoping to convince the current Aggies that they were capable of upsetting the country's top-ranked team.

Of course, the former players -- many of whom will be in College Station this weekend to receive their championship rings at halftime of the Nebraska game --had an ulterior motive of their own. While Texas A&M won it all in 1939, the Aggies also had a potential national title snatched away from them in 1940. Texas pulled off a huge 7-0 upset in the final game of the regular season that ended A&M's 20-game winning streak.

"Sometimes I think we were remembered more for losing that game to Texas in 1940 than we were for winning it all," said Jarrin' John Kimbrough, the Aggies' All-American running back in 1939-40. "It was a bitter pill to swallow."

So bitter, in fact, that members of the 1939-40 teams spent a couple days in the dorm with the '63 squad.

"They wanted us to do to Texas what Texas had done to them in 1940," Moore said of the returning A&M players. "Several of the players from that team came back, which sent us a message about how much this game meant to them. As I recall, that was the first time John Kimbrough had been back on campus since he had graduated. By the time that week was over, we were a fired up group. And we really believed we could beat Texas."

Few others around the nation believed that. Darrell Royal's Longhorns entered the game 9-0 and owning a 20-game non-losing streak in the regular season that dated back to 1961. Texas, which had never lost to A&M in Royal's first six season, also had been ranked at No. 1 ever since beating previously top-ranked Oklahoma in the fourth game of the 1963 season.

Hank Foldberg's Aggies, meanwhile, sported a 2-6-1 record entering Texas game and had not enjoyed a winning season since Paul "Bear" Bryant departed College Station in 1957.

"Nationally, I think most people thought our chances of winning that game were less than slim and none," Keller said. "But our whole campus was very supportive of us, and we thought we had a good chance.

"We had played pretty well the week before and beat Rice, so we had a little momentum. It was nothing like Texas' momentum, but we felt like all the pressure was on them. We had nothing to lose, because the entire country expected us to lose."

RAIN AND ROBBERY

When the two teams took the field on Thanksgiving Day, the playing surface resembled a Brazos Valley river bottom. Rains during the preceding week had turned Kyle Field into a mixture of mud and muck. And early on, it appeared that the powerful Longhorns would bury the undermanned Aggies in the quagmire.

Texas jumped to a 3-0 lead on its first possession of the game, apparently setting the tone for the contest. But much to the surprise of the national television audience, the Aggies responded instead of rolling over.

Early in the second quarter, Keller found Travis Reagan for a 54-yard scoring pass that enabled the Aggies to take a 7-3 lead at the half.

Then, after Moore recovered a Texas fumble at the A&M 44 in the third quarter, the Aggies really turned up the heat on the unbeaten Longhorns. Keller connected with George Hargett on a 29-yard touchdown pass to cap an eight-play drive and give A&M a 13-3 lead. Along the Texas sideline, it was so quiet, you could practically hear a national title drop.

"A lot of people must have been shocked to turn on their TV and see us leading 13-3 at the half," Moore said. And obviously, we felt very good about our chance to win the game, especially when we went up by 10."

Early in the fourth quarter, the Horns cut the lead to 13-9, but that seemed to be as close as Texas would get. Especially when A&M's John Brotherton intercepted a Tommy Wade pass at midfield with less than four minutes left in the contest.

But instead of falling on the football and giving the A&M offense a chance to run out the clock, Brotherton apparently got caught up in the excitement of the moment and tried to make something happen. He tried to lateral the ball to a teammate, but the loose ball was fumbled and recovered by Texas at the A&M 45.

That hurt. But the next A&M near-miss still stings.

With 2:24 left in the contest, Wade tied to hit George Stauer with a deep pass in the end zone. But the pass was overthrown and intercepted by A&M's Jim Willenborg near the back of the end zone. Game films and photographs would later reveal that after making the catch, Willenborg's knees hit about a yard in front of the back line and he then slid out of bounds.

The officials, however, ruled that Willenborg had been out of bounds when he picked it off.

"You're not supposed to get calls like that when you're the home team," Keller said.

"It was pure robbery," Moore said. "It should have been our ball and we could have just run out the clock. Instead, the officials gave them another opportunity."

After yet another A&M near-miss -- Hargett nearly intercepted Wade's next pass -- the Longhorns finally made the most of their second chances. With 1:19 left in the game, Texas' Duke Carlisle scored on a 1-yard run to give the Longhorns a 15-13 lead.

Then, on the first play of the ensuing drive, Texas' Jim Hudson intercepted a Keller pass, and the Horns ran out the clock.

Afterward, Foldberg tried to hold in his frustrations about the call in the end zone and the fact that A&M had been penalized eight times, while Texas had only been flagged three times. But he was unsuccessful.

"This is the greatest injustice to a group of young fellows I've ever seen," Foldberg told reporters after the game. "Willenborg was a yard inside the end zone. I'm fed up with keeping my mouth shut about it.... I don't think that Texas was No. 1 today. I thought our Aggies were. We played them right off their feet."

Indeed they did. But in the end, it was the Aggies who had the rug pulled out from underneath their own feet.

"It's been said that we let that game slip away," Moore said. "I don't think that's really accurate. It would be more accurate to say that we had it taken away. We did everything we needed to do to win that game. And in my opinion, we did win it. Even the Texas players, although they probably wouldn't admit it, know that in their hearts.

"I've spent a lot of years dreaming about the officials reversing that call. I'm pretty sure that's not going to happen now. But maybe one of these days the law of averages will all work out, and (the Aggies) will get the breaks and pull off a huge upset."