For a week, Black Bear fans have been talking about Saturday’s NCAA Division I-AA playoff game football game. Nearly every conversation, at one point or another, has probably included the same convenient four-word prefix:

“For the first time in …”

As in, “For the first time in 12 years, UMaine will play in an NCAA playoff game when it faces McNeese State at 8 p.m. Saturday in Lake Charles, La.”

Mike Buck, for one, remembers the last time the Black Bears made it this far.

Buck was the star senior quarterback when his eighth-ranked University of Maine squad headed to Springfield, Mo., to take on Southwest Missouri State. The year: 1989.

In fact, Buck was a key component of both UMaine tournament squads, as he also ran the offense when Maine lost to Georgia Southern – also on the road – in 1987.

“The first time we went, it was all so new to everybody,” Buck said. “I was young at the time.”

Buck, who was named the head coach of Arena Football 2’s Pensacola Barracudas on Nov. 20, has some vivid memories those two games.

Among them is the near-perfect first half he and the Bears put together in ’87 against the defending national champs of Georgia Southern.

Buck completed 14 of 22 tosses for 196 yards before intermission as the Black Bears piled up a 28-10 lead over a team that had never lost a postseason game.

“I can remember having the best half of football in my life in the first half. We lit it up,” Buck said on Thursday. “It was a funny thing. I never remember having that feeling before, but none of us wanted to come into the locker room at the half.”

The Eagles roared back from that deficit and ended up beating the Bears 31-28 in overtime.

Still, Buck said that experience was a good one.

“At that point, we were all just happy to be there, and we knew we could compete then,” Buck said.

He wasn’t nearly as pleased by what happened in 1989, however.

“The last year we went, that was the year we had the team to win the whole thing,” Buck said. The Bears knew they were a shoo-in to make the tourney field, and were planning to face somebody … anybody … in a home playoff game.

Instead, they ended up being shipped to Missouri to take on a team that had been ranked below the Bears in the national poll.

“That was a bad taste,” Buck said. “And then we went down and laid a goose egg and lost to a team we should have killed.”

Buck said he and the Bears hadn’t been able to practice outdoors for some time due to the weather, but were looking forward to taking advantage of a home-tundra advantage in chilly Orono.

“We would have walked all over [southern] teams, especially in the early rounds [if we’d had a home game],” Buck said.

Instead, the Bears lost another squeaker, 38-35, on a 33-yard field goal in the final seconds of the game.

“We just got caught again,” Buck said.

Buck said he keeps in touch “sporadically” with some of the Maine staff, including head coach Jack Cosgrove [an assistant when Buck was a player] and offensive coordinator Bobby Wilder [whom Buck beat out for the starting quarterback job as a redshirt sophomore].

He joked that his old friends got in touch with him more often when he was playing in the NFL.

“[I’d call] a couple of times a year to wish them good luck and they would call me to ask for money,” Buck said with a laugh.

Buck is confident that the fact that Cosgrove experienced playoff football before will help him prepare the Bears for whatever they’ll face in Louisiana.

And he figures that the Bears will benefit from the experience whether they earn a second-round berth or not.

“To see what’s out there, and to see how you really stack up against these other teams, win or lose it’s great for the program because there are so many underclassmen,” Buck said, drawing a comparison to the team he played on as a sophomore.

“Our last year [1989), everyone left. I don’t know how that helped. But I know it helped two years before, and I hope it helps [UMaine in the future] in terms of getting players there and recruiting,” Buck said.