The “Husker Prayer” has been around since at least the ’90s. The tradition may or may not have originated with Grant Wistrom. I’ve known for a while that it was a heavily telephoned version of a 1920s poem (“Prayer of a Sportsman”) by poet and possible Wisconsin fan Berton Braley, but I could never find exactly where it came from. Even the Berton Braley Cyber Museum didn’t have any information on its original publication.

Well, here’s the closest I could come. A monthly newsletter called The American Tyler-Keystone (“Devoted to Freemasonry and Its Concordant Orders”) published the poem on what appears to be the cover of the January 1921 edition.