n the heat of the 1998 Aloha Bowl held last Christmas in Hawaii, a television announcer looked down at the University of Colorado Buffaloes and the University of Oregon Ducks thrashing it out on the football field and described the event as "a contest between two Nike teams." Swaddled head to toe in Nike gear, the players looked something like a 100-yard commercial. But while one team would go on to win the game, the other would walk away with something a little more lasting: new clothes. Only two days before, standing in front of a phalanx of photographers on a Hawaiian beach, two Oregon players modeled striking new uniforms for the 1999-2000 football season. The revolutionary and unabashedly high-tech costumes, painstakingly designed over the last two years by Nike’s top creative minds, looked good. The Ducks looked serious. They looked sleek. They looked, well, comfortable—possibly a first in football toggery. Sure, the Ducks went on to lose the game to Colorado. Sure, they had to return to their soggy state without the victory they wanted. Sure, they ended their season still mired in the "hopefuls" section of the PAC-10 lists, enduring headlines such as "Paradise Lost" in the university newspaper. But they had some damn fine threads to show for it. After years in standard-issue football jerseys and pants, the Ducks were going high-tech, high-class, and high-caliber, in the most advanced uniforms the country has ever seen.