When force on an object becomes too great for it to bear, the object gives way. No matter if the force doesn't seem like much, or if the object looks plenty sturdy enough to take it.

	After a near-fatal freak accident, Kori Saunders is back for her sophomore season.

That's the thing about physics; it's coldly, rigidly logical -- whether it makes any sense to us or not.

And the truth is, this doesn't make any sense at all: Nebraska soccer player Kori Saunders spent years going through whatever she couldn't get around on the field, never backing away from contact (her dad is an NFL coach, by the way) and didn't get hurt. Ever.

Then one day she's sitting down, and just misses being killed.

"Actually, I'd always been really lucky. I'd seen teammates get hurt, get knee injuries and things like that, and I'd never been hurt," Saunders said. "I guess it finally caught up to me, but what a weird way to get hurt."

In the journalism business we're told to avoid cliché terms such as "freak accident." Generally, that's a good rule.

But this can be called nothing else but a freak accident. About the freakiest, in fact.

First, we'll tell you that Saunders, who missed Nebraska's first 10 games of the season, is just fine now. She's back on the soccer field for the third-ranked and undefeated Cornhuskers, for whom she had eight goals and five assists as a freshman in a 22-1-2 season last year.

She had an assist in her first game this season, Sept. 29 at Missouri. She was in a couple of cool collisions and played her usual fearless midfielder position in a victory at Kansas on Oct. 1.

She says other than needing to get her legs back a bit, she feels 100 percent.

Now we'll tell you how amazing that is.

On Aug. 10 during preseason two-a-days, Saunders was at teammate Brooke Jones' apartment in Lincoln, Neb., playing a little late-afternoon Nintendo with her pals, sitting on a glass-and-wood coffee table.

And then, just like that, the table collapsed. Loud noise, followed by embarrassed laughter from Kori. Har-har, she broke the table. That'll crack up everybody in practice tomorrow, won't it?

	“	Fortunately it was not as bad as it could have been. They told us if that glass had gone an inch the other way, it might have severed her spinal cord. It might have paralyzed her. Or it might have killed her. ”
		— Kori's father, Al Saunders, an associate head coach with the St. Louis Rams

"It wasn't painful," Saunders recalled. "But I felt my back, and there was something sticking out. I expected it to be a little, tiny shard. So I started pulling it out."

Well, yeah, the piece of glass that protruded out of her back was pretty small.

The rest of it that was inside her was 8 inches long.

"I'm pulling, and I start to realize it's pretty big," Saunders said. "I'm telling my friends, 'This is deep, this is deep.' "

The floor started getting soaked with blood, and Jones ran to call 911.

Still, as they waited for the ambulance, Saunders was calm. Then on the ride to the hospital, the ambulance attendant told her, frankly, how bad it might be.

"She said, 'We're worried you're running a risk of becoming paralyzed, because your spinal cord's probably swelling,' " Saunders said. "That was when I first realized it was really serious."

Meanwhile, her father, Al Saunders, was in Macomb, Ill., for the St. Louis Rams training camp. He has been a football coach since 1970, in the NFL since 1983, and last season was the culmination of all that work: In his first year as the Rams' associate head coach in charge of wide receivers, he'd been part of a Super Bowl championship.

So on this August day, he was in one of the endless meetings football coaches endure when a security guard rushed in to tell him there was an emergency phone call.

He and the doctors at Lincoln General Hospital decided it was best to send Kori by helicopter to the University of Nebraska Medical Center in nearby Omaha in case she needed surgery. Kori's mom, Karen Saunders, caught the next plane from St. Louis to Omaha. Al made the seven-hour drive there from Macomb.

Longest seven hours of his life?

"It was," Al Saunders said. "Mainly because you just don't know how she is. I didn't have a cell phone with me. I knew she was in good hands, and my wife was going to be there, but there was some great anxiety.

"Fortunately it was not as bad as it could have been. They told us if that glass had gone an inch the other way, it might have severed her spinal cord. It might have paralyzed her. Or it might have killed her.

"We were very, very lucky."

Now, if you think all of this is told by father and daughter in breathless, movie-of-the-week tones, if you think Kori says stuff like, "Now, I just appreciate every moment of every day, hearing birds sing, seeing the sun shine" ... well, those are clichés.

Al is straightforward, no embellishments, no melodrama. And Kori is the same way. Which actually makes the story even more riveting.

You ask Kori how scared she was, how it's changed her life.

She's sitting on the bench by Kansas' soccer field, her face still red from the midafternoon sun and the exertion. She has shown you the scar, a reddish-pink 2½ inches to the right of her backbone.

She has told you about the flak jacket she wears to protect the wound, the one her dad had the Rams training staff make, much like what a quarterback wears. She doesn't mind it while on the field, but once she's on the sidelines she notices how uncomfortable it is and can't wait to tear it off.

She has shown you where her gum is cut and bleeding, her tooth a bit chipped, from one of the collisions that day, the one that kept her on the ground for maybe 5 seconds.

She has relayed the conversation she had with the referee when she got up.

"He said, 'Are you OK?' and I said, 'Oh, I'm fine.' He said, 'Are you bleeding?' and I said, 'Oh, no.'

"He said, 'Let's see your mouth. Smile.' And so I tried to smile without showing him my teeth."

The ref wasn't fooled.

"He said, 'Open your mouth,' and then he sent me off."

Of course, Saunders could have said, "Hey, guy, you think this little bit of blood is going to keep me from playing? Are you kidding? This is nothing. You want to talk about blood ...."

Nah. She just went over, got a drink, spit it out and waited to go back in -- which she soon did.

It had been only three days before her first game back, at Missouri, that she had resumed full-contact practice. It had been only one day before that game that she'd passed a physical test to be allowed to play.

"She was adamant that she wanted to play this season," Nebraska coach John Walker said. "I wasn't surprised by that. She's a high-energy person. I was surprised, though, that she recovered quickly enough to do it."

That scary, awful night in August, the doctors in Omaha decided she didn't require surgery. A vertebrae and her right kidney both had been nicked. She would need a minimum of two weeks' bed rest. She would be in a lot of pain. But she was going to be OK.

Somehow, that long piece of glass had not done any serious, lasting damage.

And as soon as Kori knew that ... Pain, yeah, whatever, she'd deal with it. Two weeks doing absolutely nothing? Now that would be a little more difficult.

This is the youngest of three siblings, the little sister who doggedly chased her two brothers in every endeavor.

"I attribute all my aggressiveness to my brothers," she said, and this is where she cracks a smile. "I was always trying to do what they did, they were always bigger and faster and better."

Two weeks? Doing nothing? OK, but ...

"The day after (the accident) I woke up at 6 a.m. and asked the doctor, 'When can I play again?' " Saunders said.

Here's more evidence of how single-minded she can be. The whole family was at the Super Bowl in Atlanta. Except Kori. She thought it was best to stay in Lincoln and not miss a day of off-season conditioning drills.

Um, this was in January. Seven months before the season started.

"It's not like coach wouldn't have let me go," she said. "That wouldn't have been any problem. It's just that ..."

She never even asked.

"I wasn't thinking very clearly," she said ruefully. "My mom called on the cell phone after the game, and I could hear everybody, my dad, my brothers, and I thought, 'Oh, I wish I was there.' If they go again, I'll definitely be there."

Kids don't always know what their parents do for them, and Kori and her brothers might not fully realize that the decision their father made when he joined the Kansas City Chiefs staff in 1989 was a pretty rare one in his profession.

He and his wife decided the kids came first, the career second. Sure, he still had those crazy hours of a football coach, the marathon film sessions, but there would be a halt to jumping from job to job. He'd had to do that to make it to the NFL, like most coaches do. He'd been at five colleges in the 13 years before joining the San Diego Chargers as an assistant. He'd been head coach for 2½ seasons at San Diego.

Once in Kansas City, he looked at his kids and knew he wanted them to grow up there.

"We made a decision as a family that we would stay until all three children graduated from high school," Al said. "That became more important than any vocational opportunities. It was something I wanted to give to my children."

The 10 years he spent with the Chiefs were good ones -- the team did just about everything except go to the Super Bowl. But when Marty Schottenheimer resigned as head coach during Kori's senior year in high school, Al Saunders knew he'd have to move on.

By that time, he'd seen his daughter become the best soccer player in the Kansas City metro area. But Al Saunders had not been one of those men who didn't recognize the value of women's and girls sports until he had a daughter involved.

"I've always appreciated the role of women in athletic competition, because at a young age I was a competitive swimmer and there were girls who could beat me," he said. "I've always had great admiration for that. But it's great now that team sports have come to the forefront for women."

Although it didn't take Kori to spark his enthusiasm for women's sports, he acknowledges that it was her that got him interested in soccer.

"I've really come to appreciate that sport, not only the technical aspects but the creative aspects," he said. "I didn't know anything about soccer really until Kori played in high school.

"I've gone to several (Kansas City) Wizards games. I love watching the U.S. women's national team on television."

He chuckles, aware of the stereotype that football people don't like soccer.

"I find myself watching it on TV, which I never thought I would do," he said. "I can see why it captures the fancy of the world.

"I saw every game of the (Women's) World Cup last year. It has been terrific for women's athletes in general. It's about time they were given the recognition."

The success of the World Cup, of course, was the springboard for WUSA, the women's pro soccer league that begins in the United States next April. Kori and every other promising young college soccer player is well aware of that.

What the WNBA did for women's college basketball, WUSA can do for women's college soccer. No, not everyone will make it to the pro level. But ...

"There's something to shoot for now," Kori said.

Then she's walking across the field, the bus waiting for her. You consider that you didn't nail down exactly how scared she might have been, how the accident might have changed her, how unbelievable it is that six weeks after it happened she's competing again for one of the best teams in the country ... and then you realize that maybe she's not going to spend a whole lot of time thinking about all that.

It seems she lives a lot like she -- and the Cornhuskers -- play soccer.

Just keep going forward.

Mechelle Voepel of the Kansas City Star is a regular contributor to ESPN.com, primarily covering women's college basketball. She can be reached via e-mail at mvoepel@kcstar.com.