Between 2000 and 2004, the Penn football team was the bully of the Ivy League.
The Quakers won 32 of 35 conference games and three Ancient Eight championships.
Teams played Penn and fell apart. The Quakers got the lucky breaks that they needed, and rarely had to play any close games.
Harvard was a good four games behind Penn in those five years, losing three out of five games against the Quakers, and not having quite the same persona.
Only Brown -- and just barely at 18-17 -- was above .500 in League play among the other six teams.
But this year was different.
The bully got punched in the mouth a few times, and like the bullies in the schoolyard, did not know how to fight back.
Three out of Penn's four recent losses have been to teams that the Quakers have dominated in the last few years.
After those losses, the opposing coaches and players were elated to finally beat the Red and Blue.
2005 has been Revenge of the Nerds all over again.
Meanwhile, after each loss came the same response from Penn coach Al Bagnoli -- he was not sure how to fix what went wrong, and just said that his team got beat up on the field.
"We can't seem to get out of [this funk]; we can't make plays when they're there for us," was this week's line, after a dismal 16-7 loss to Cornell.
Meanwhile, Big Red head coach Jim Knowles, like Princeton's Roger Hughes and Brown's Phil Estes before him, talked about how this was one of the biggest wins in his program's recent history.
Yes, Penn got dealt some very bad cards this year.
No one can say for sure how much of an impact Kyle Ambrogi's October suicide had on his teammates. In addition, several members of the offensive line, starting quarterback Pat McDermott, and the top two running backs -- Sam Mathews and Joe Sandberg -- were all hurt to varying degrees at times during the year.
But if football is as mental as it has seemed this year, the Quakers completely lost the edge that they had over their Ivy League foes.
The Red and Blue whimpered to the finish line this season, and Bagnoli almost admitted that he and his team were relieved that the season mercifully came to an end.
"I don't know about relief ... but we don't want to see them on that kind of low," he said.
And instead of being angry that they lost and wanting to go out and beat a team next week, the Quakers instead seem to want to run home crying.
There is no doubt that this has been one of the most trying seasons a football team can experience, but those comments are not the ones that you would expect to hear coming from the coach of the team that was picked to win the Ivy League championship.
Penn was defeated physically and emotionally at the end of this season.
Because of their end-of-year tailspin, it's going to take some time for the Quakers to get their tough reputation back.
Penn showed this year that it could be pushed around just as much as it has pushed around seven other teams for half a decade.
And there is a new dynamic on the Ivy League football playground.
That is because the bully got beaten up this year.
Josh Hirsch is a junior Urban Studies major from Roslyn, N.Y., and is senior sports editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian. His e-mail address is jjhirsch@sas.upenn.edu.
