A FRONT ROW VIEW: Remember the perfect season

This is how I'm going to remember the 1993-94 Penn basketball team. And it will have nothing to do with the Florida Gators. It will have to do with Nebraska. And Princeton. It will have to do with the Ivy League. And the Associated Press Top 25. People tend to forget that in the NCAA Tournament, there's only two ways not to go out a loser -- win the whole thing or not make the field in the first place. When the Penn football team went undefeated, it couldn't continue on in the postseason because of Ivy League rules. We can argue and speculate about how the Quakers would have done, but still the team's perfection remains untarnished. Our last memory of the football team is storming the field after it won its 10th game in as many tries. Basketball is different. You play until you lose. Nobody expected the Quakers to end up in Charlotte this season. And although most people probably preferred not to look at it this way, if they had then they would have realized Penn's final game this season had to end in defeat. So why should this inevitable conclusion spoil an otherwise phenomenal season? Let's celebrate what the Quakers did accomplish this year, not lament over what might have been. Too often this season we took Penn basketball for granted. Too often the Palestra resembled a mortuary more than a madhouse. After all, the Ivy League wasn't much of a challenge. At times we were so caught up with the fact the Quakers were going to go two years without losing a single league game that we lost sight of what it takes to go unbeaten in the league two years in a row. All season long, we had eyes only for the tournament. If we can win just one game, we said. And when the Quakers accomplished that, we asked them to win two. Our expectations became so high we were delirious with the possibilities. Now there's nothing wrong with high expectations. The fans have them. The players have them. Fran Dunphy has often remarked he never enters a game expecting to lose, and this is how it should be. But when expectations are so high they cloud our vision of the magnitude of Penn's achievements, there is a problem. When each accomplishment yields even higher expectations for the next game, eventually those expectations will go unfulfilled. Unfortunately, the last image we have of the 1993-94 Quakers is a losing image. But this isn't how it should be. Don't remember Matt Maloney for his performance against the Gators. For all the no-no-no's we screamed this year as he let fly a 20-footer, a good many of them found their way into the bottom of the basket. Remember Maloney for the 10 assists he dished out against Nebraska. Without him, the Quakers don't get where they're going. Remember Matt Maloney this season for a night a few weeks ago. With most of his teammates struggling offensively, Maloney put the Quakers on his shoulders against Princeton, as they clinched the Ivy crown and an NCAA bid. Remember him for that. Don't remember Barry Pierce for his last game as a Quaker. Remember him for all the other games. The Nebraska game where he scored 25 points in leading Penn to its first tournament victory in over a decade. Remember him as a freshman in 1990 when the Quakers were 9-17. Now remember him as a senior, four years and back-to-back Ivy titles later. The 1994-95 Quakers will be a good team. A very good team, to be sure. But they will replace Pierce's jump shot much more easily than his heart, and they will replace his defense a lot more easily than his toughness. The 1993-94 Quakers were a special team. The season was a special season. Don't remember them as the team that could have beaten Florida and advanced to the Sweet Sixteen. To do that would be to sell short everything this team accomplished. Remember them as the team that beat Nebraska. The team that went undefeated in winning the Ivy League championship for the second time in two years. The team that broke into the AP Top 25 for the first time since 1979. Winning sports teams are not a birthright for Ivy League students -- just ask Brown. In fact, just ask the Penn graduates from a few years ago. Don't remember this team the way it went out. Remember the Quakers the way they went in. One of the best Ivy League basketball teams in recent memory. Remember them for that. Steven Cook is a Wharton junior from West Bloomfield, Mich., and a sports writer for The Daily Pennsylvanian.