Overshadowed by the euphoria of Kansas University’s stunning 40-15 football victory over Nebraska a fortnight ago was the fact KU had set a single-game attendance record.

In a stadium that officially seats 50,071 fannies, the NU-KU game lured 51,750 patrons. At least that’s the crowd KU officials announced.

I’m not going to dispute that number. I have no reason to believe it’s incorrect. At the same time, however, I don’t think it was the single-game record based on actual bodies in Memorial Stadium.

For nearly two decades, the record attendance for a Kansas home football game was listed as 53,235. That was the announced crowd for the Kansas State game in 1973. Then, in the early ’90s, that figure was shaved to 51,574. In other words, 1,661 fans suddenly disappeared.

What happened? KU officials had opted to use the actual audited attendance instead.

You have to remember that when Kansas belonged to the old Big Eight Conference it wasn’t unusual for league members to do a little, uh, creative bookkeeping borne out of the split-gate requirement. The smaller the official crowd, the smaller check you had to fork over to the other school.

I’m not saying Kansas was guilty of such hanky-panky in pursuit of an extra penny, but I do know other schools were.

Anyway, split gates went the way of the passenger pigeon with the birth of the Big 12 Conference in 1996. Big 12 teams pocket all the money from home games. Visitors receive nothing.

Thus, in contemporary times, you can count all the bodies in the stands with impunity, and I’m convinced after talking to John Novotny that there really were 53,235 bodies in Memorial Stadium for that ’73 Kansas-Kansas State game.

“That was legitimate,” said Novotny, who was a KU assistant athletic director at the time.

Memorial Stadium’s capacity in ’73 was 51,500 because portable bleachers in the south end zone accommodated 1,500 people.

“We sold all the tickets,” Novotny said. “We didn’t have a single one left, so we went to the Journal-World and had them print up about 2,000 black-and-white, standing-room-only tickets.”

KU officials stretched ropes from those south end zone bleachers to the southwest and southeast corners of the stadium proper, and fans who bought those SRO ducats stood behind those ropes.

“Everybody and his dog was trying to get into that game,” Novotny said.

In later years, when the south bleachers no longer were used, Campanile hill became a more popular viewing site and crowds of 7,000 to 8,000 on the grass weren’t unusual for KU-KSU games in the early ’90s.

In fact, I believe that more people saw the 1994 K-State game in person than any other game in KU history. The audited crowd that day was 48,800, but KU police estimated the throng on the hill at about 7,000. In other words, at least 55,000 people were witnesses.

We won’t ever see such a mass of humanity on the hill again because the huge new scoreboard effectively blocks the view.

When it comes to Kansas football attendance, you can believe in revisionist history or you can believe in oral history. Take your pick.