There will not be any "Miracle" or "Seabiscuit" made about this weekend's Howe Cup or next weekend's CSA Team championships, the season-ending team tournaments in women's and men's squash, respectively.
Not only will there not be a shocker of epic proportions, there probably will not be an upset even on a "hmm, that's surprising" scale, either.
Such is the nature of collegiate squash.
The Penn women's team, ranked fifth in the nation, lost to each of the top four teams, and beat each of the eight lower-ranked teams it faced.
On the men's side, the eighth-ranked Quakers suffered the same fate. They faced eight lower-ranked teams, and all seven higher-ranked teams.
Their record: a shocking 8-7.
The closest that the college squash world came to true upset was when then-No. 2 Yale ended the streak of 20 straight victories by the Trinity women in January, and when No. 3 Harvard beat No. 2 Yale to win the men's Ivy title.
Squash is really only played as a team sport at the college level. There are nine matches in a dual meet, first to five, straight up. There are no points for stronger victories like in wrestling, and no doubles like in tennis. It is an individual game forced into a team setting -- with over 400 points in each match.
With so many points, the better team will almost undoubtedly come out in front. Penn women's coach Jim Martel, for one, is in favor of shorter matches, which would in theory make them more competitive.
"I think there should be five-person teams," Martel said.
However, that is not likely to happen any time soon. With that in the coaches' minds, recruiting becomes extremely important, as coaches need to try to build the strongest teams possible. There can be no "systems," such as Princeton basketball's motion offense, for example.
Trinity's men's team, which has won the last five national championships and was recently featured on ESPN's SportsCenter for winning 100 consecutive matches, is a team built on this principle. A large percentage of the Bantams are international players who were champions of their respective countries.
In the Ivy League, which collectively has the best squash in the nation outside of Trinity, simply plucking the best players in the world is not possible for academic reasons. This puts Ancient Eight coaches in a unique situation.
"I feel strongly about making the team as strong as possible," Penn men's coach Craig Thorpe-Clark said. "I get the best players that fit the criteria for Ivy League squash."
Another key factor in the lack of upsets is the lack of momentum. With every player's responsibility the same -- beat your one opponent -- there is no go-to player who can carry a team, nor one mistake that can cost a team a match. There are also at least three matches going on at once, so the other players cannot quite build on their teammates' successes.
"Squash is a very controlled game," Martel said. "It's not like basketball, where there are variables, or baseball, where if a guy makes a bad pitch or makes a bad play" it could cost his team the game.
"In squash, it's just one-on-one," Penn freshman Radhika Ahluwalia said. "You make a mistake, and they put you away."
"You've got nine individual competitions going on," said Penn sophomore Colby Emerson, who contrasted that with the frightening possibility of a superstar quarterback having an off day.
So what is a coach to do when he is facing a match against a team he knows he cannot beat?
"You only learn from playing the best," Thorpe-Clark said. "It's great experience."
Martel said he hopes that his players are able to learn what types of things the elite teams are good at, in order to improve in those areas themselves and to use them for the next match against a similar-quality opponent.
Even though it might not happen, the players keep working as hard as they can because if a tremendous upset does happen, it will be more surprising than what happened at Lake Placid.
