The feeling doesn't match the record.
The Penn football team went 8-1 this season, finished 6-1 in the Ivy League for the third straight year, but there's no one jumping up and down about it, much less throwing goalposts in the Schuylkill.
The reason, of course, is what happened about a week and a half ago up in Boston. There an unbeaten Quakers squad met unbeaten Harvard, and were sent back to West Philly with a 28-21 loss and a very slim hope of grabbing a piece of the Ancient Eight crown.
And so, the Quakers' best record in seven years feels like something else entirely.
"It's weird," Penn quarterback Gavin Hoffman said. "Eight-and-one is obviously a better record than [last year's] 7-3, but it definitely feels worse.
"At the beginning of the season, if you'd have said we were going to be 8-1, I would have just assumed we'd also be Ivy champs."
Hoffman and everybody else.
After a stunning campaign in 2000 -- during which the Red and Blue seemed to come from behind every other week on their way to the title -- Penn was a near-unanimous preseason pick to win it all this year.
A prohibitive favorite, the Quakers returned 18 of 22 starters, including Hoffman, the 2000 Ivy League Player of the Year, and Kris Ryan, 1999's Ivy League rushing champ.
And, through the season's first seven weeks, the favorites made good.
They opened with a 37-0 drubbing of a lackluster Lafayette team before opening the Ancient Eight season by escaping Hanover, N.H. with a 21-20 win over Dartmouth. The victory was sealed by a blocked extra point by Kyle Chaffin.
Despite that nailbiter, the Quakers dispatched most of the opponents that gave them trouble last year with relative ease.
The following week, they avenged last year's embarrassing loss at Holy Cross by spanking the Crusaders, 43-7, at Franklin Field. Two weeks later, Penn beat Yale, 21-3.
At this point, the Quakers were 3-0 in the league, heading into their first big test of the season -- a showdown with a tough Brown team up in Providence, R.I.
"They were such a hyped-up offense," linebacker and two-time captain Dan Morris said. "It was one of those big meaningful games, that had turned out to be a pretty big rivalry after what happened last year."
Last year, the Quakers and Bears got into a scuffle at the end of the game, after Penn overcame an 18-point deficit in the last five minutes. This year, the Quakers shut down the Bears' offense, holding them to just 14 points.
Despite all of this, the season turned on just one game.
The Quakers were up, 14-0, on the Crimson and seemed to be on their way to a second straight title. But then Harvard scored four unanswered touchdowns before the Quakers got their final one.
"It's one of those games that a player dreams about playing," Hoffman said. "It was a great crowd, and two undefeated teams playing for the conference championship. It was just a great atmosphere."
Of course, the air would've been a little sweeter had the Quakers come out on top.
Even after the loss, though, the Quakers could still have gotten a piece of the Ivy crown. All they needed after they dispatched Cornell, 38-14, on Saturday was for the Elis to beat the Crimson, and they could have been co-champs.
In any case, it wouldn't have been the same.
"It definitely would not have felt the same tied with Harvard, knowing that they beat us when it counted," Hoffman said. "It wouldn't have meant as much as winning it outright."
