The game was good. The tweet was better.

Here’s the tweet.

It’s been deleted, so here’s it being shared by our good friends at Indiana’s SB Nation site, Crimson Quarry.

If you spent any time on Twitter in the hours after the Illini’s dominant 41-23 win over Nebraska on Saturday, you saw that tweet.

Need some background?

Nebraska has said for MONTHS that it is solely the reason there is Big Ten football this fall (instead of in the spring OR not at all). Nebraska has also not done anything to back up its talk on the field, instead falling to 1-3 after arguably the best looking conference win of the Lovie Smith era.

So, then Illinois actually comes through on Saturday, and then the OFFICIAL @IlliniAthletics account tweets: “Good game Nebraska. Thanks for bringing back B1G football.”

Pardon the missing comma (“Good game, Nebraska”) and the shortened Big Ten (personally, I hate seeing B1G as such), it’s a helluva tweet. To be honest, I was stunned it came from the official account at first. Seems more TCR than DIA, if you know what I mean?

It garnered so much reaction. Like national attention.

But my personal favorite.

Which led to...

And from TCR’s very own...

And then, just like Nebraska’s chances at being a winning football program under Scott Frost, the tweet, vanished. It was deleted.

As someone who works in news and runs large social media accounts for a living, I get it. If there’s something that is going to cause a stir, you want to get that out. Take out the trash. And just delete it.

But, except for the crabby Cornhuskers, was this tweet doing any bad? If anything, it was doing WONDERS for the program.

On a day where there were pseudo-division championship games (Northwestern over Wisconsin, and Ohio State over Indiana), Illinois was the talk of the town? Give me that all day, every day.

It’s not a bad thing to have some swagger. You think about UMBC after it became the first No. 16 seed to upset a No. 1 seed (Virginia) a few years back. UMBC’s Twitter still carries that weight, and now, I often think about the Retrievers’ Twitter page.

Let’s make people think of Illinois. Let’s go from Lovie’s lovable losers — or, in some cases, Lovie’s losers — to that team in Champaign that has attitude, can win some football games, and can make fun of itself in the process.

Saturday’s game was the most complete game I’ve seen from the Illini in years. Why not celebrate it that you’re not in the cellar anymore of the Big Ten West?

Enjoy it, Nebraska. And thanks for bringing football back.