The opening words of Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities perfectly describe the mood at Franklin Field after the Penn football team's season finale against Cornell Saturday.
The Big Red, 16-7 victors, won the Trustees' Cup for the first time since 1999 and the whole team -- including coach Jim Knowles -- was visibly elated after the final horn sounded.
On the other hand, the result was one final disappointment in a long and difficult season for the Penn Quakers.
In delivering a crude, morning-after retrospective, you almost need to look at the 2005 campaign as two different seasons.
In a purely football sense, things changed on or around Oct. 22, after Penn's 38-21 win over Yale, in which the Quakers utterly dominated the Elis over the first three quarters.
The next four weeks, as has been oft-documented, saw the Quakers fall into a tailspin and lose four consecutive Ivy League games for the first time in coach Al Bagnoli's tenure.
Losing engendered more losing.
"We're really pressing so hard to make plays that we're really missing out on some golden opportunities," Bagnoli said.
But pressing wasn't the only factor on the field. The Yale game was the first that quarterback Pat McDermott missed with a shoulder injury. That ailment forced him to sit the next week against Brown.
And it wasn't just the injury to McDermott that doomed the Quakers. The veteran offensive line was ravaged with injuries to seniors Don Snyder and Keith Walewski.
The running game suffered as a result. Over the first six games, Penn averaged 160.5 yards on the ground. Over the four losses, the rushing corps averaged only 75.7.
Of course you do need to take into account that Penn played its four toughest opponents during the stretch. But there was something more going on here.
"It's a very fine line in this league between having confidence and having momentum and having a bounce in your step," Bagnoli said. "All that stuff carries over."
But for whatever occurred on the field this season for the Quakers, the 2005 Penn team will be defined for what happened off the field.
Though the Quakers certainly used Kyle Ambrogi's suicide as motivation, especially in wins over Columbia and Yale, it would be impossible to negate the emotional toll that the loss of a friend and teammate took on the team.
"We exerted so much emotional energy," Bagnoli said. "There's only so much you have in the tank."
Bagnoli spoke about the residual effects of the tragedy on his players. These are kids, anywhere from 18 to 22, trying to cope with what happened while catching up in classes, preparing for the upper echelon of the Ivy League and handling losing -- something no one around here had done in quite some time.
And that, I believe, is the greatest accomplishment of this year's team. If Ivy League athletics are indeed supposed to teach the student-athlete about ideals such as teamwork, courage and perseverance against all odds, then the 2005 Quakers are champions, no matter what their record is.
Senior linebacker and captain Ric San Doval summed it up best.
"I've been proud of the team," he said. "The record might not show it but, just the emotional roller coaster that we've been through all year long, to see 110 guys come together like they did, that's what I'm going to remember."
And that is what we all should remember about this team and this season.
Andrew Jamieson is a senior International Relations major from New York. His e-mail address is jamiesoa@sas.upenn.edu.
