COLUMN: Penn's seniors have done us extremely proud

From Jed Walentas's "A Front Row View," Fall '95 As much as I wanted to cry, I couldn't. I could not muster those tears up. As sad as I was after Alabama's overtime victory over my beloved Quakers Thursday night, the tears never came. It wasn't only because I didn't have dirty contact lenses either. I was too proud. Too proud of the the way the Quakers fought back from double-digit deficits. Too proud of the way they answered devastating tomahawk slams from Antonio McDyess that knocked many Penn faithful off the bandwagon and perhaps their bar stools as well. Too proud of the way Jerome Allen and Matt Maloney performed in the national spotlight, showing America that Penn indeed did have one of the top backcourts in the nation. Too proud of Ira Bowman's clutch performance at the foul line in the final minutes. And in the bigger picture I was too proud of the way Fran Dunphy and his entire program have represented each and every one of us as Penn students during the three years I've been here in West Philly. Sure, they've lost games we didn't expect them to lose. Sure, we had dreams of the Sweet 16 and Cinderella's slippers on Jerome Allen's feet. Sure we were disappointed by the close losses to city rivals St. Joe's, Temple and Villanova -- all games the Quakers could have and arguably should have won. Sure we wanted to upset No. 1 UMass on its home floor in front of a national television audience. Ah, the burden of expectations. I remember back to freshman year. Before I had come to know and love these Quakers both on and off the basketball court. Back when I was too shy to say hi to Jerome Allen when I saw him on the walk, and when I couldn't pick Matt Maloney out of a sparse crowd in Cavanaugh's. Silly freshman. Now Jerome always says hi. That's when I believed my sophomore hallmates when they told me Princeton would win the Ivies once again, when I took the Orange Line to the Spectrum believing Penn had no chance of knocking off traditional Big East powerhouse Villanova. I barely knew what the Big 5 was. Silly freshman. This year I was consumed by the Big 5. It was a time when I laughed at everyone who told me Allen was an NBA prospect. Silly freshman. Jerome Allen will get drafted this spring. When Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim called Penn a "Big 5 team, not an Ivy team" during Penn's 1979 Final Four run, he was right. But a decade-long drought reclassified the Quakers in the Ancient Eight in the eyes of the nation and myself. When I arrived on campus freshman year, that was my perception too. Silly freshman. The five seniors who played their final game against Alabama Thursday night turned the Quakers back into a Big 5 team. They restored the Palestra into the most electric gym in the nation. Despite last week's disappointments, when five Philadelphia schools lost in the first round of postseason play, the Quakers' seniors helped put the City of Brotherly Love front and center on the hoops map. When they beat Michigan in Ann Arbor with Dick Vitale looking on, they gave the Penn campus a vibrancy it cannot get from a U.S. News & World Report ranking, a nationally acclaimed scholar or even a visit from Gorbachev. They gave myself and thousands of other students joy that we did not anticipate when we checked into the Quad freshman year. And all we had to do was clap. Jed Walentas is a College junior from New York and Sports Editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian.