DALLAS -- When people look back on the seasons of teams that don't win their championships, there are always questions that begin with "What if."
What if that bad call hadn't been made? If that bad injury hadn't occurred? The answer to just one of these questions could be the difference in a team's quest.
This season's Penn basketball squad is no exception.
But its continued string of "what ifs" made its eight-point loss to 2-seed Texas on Friday not as surprising as it may have seemed.
Penn may have won the Ivy League by two games, but it was not as easy as first thought when the Red and Blue started the league season by demolishing Cornell and Columbia.
The Quakers blew double-digit leads against Columbia, Cornell, Harvard and Yale, and fell behind Brown and Princeton. Although they won all but two of those games, the Quakers clearly showed a tendency of not playing all 40 minutes of basketball.
Outside of the conference, Penn struggled to put away Siena and Navy. The Quakers also let double-digit leads become 18-point losses to Colorado and Fordham, couldn't make enough big plays to shock No. 1 Duke or No. 3 Villanova and, worst of all, failed to execute down the stretch at all against Big 5 rivals Temple and Saint Joseph's.
While Penn did have a few decent wins over Siena, Drexel, Hawaii and La Salle, the Quakers led for basically all of those games and held on for dear life to win them.
Only in games against far-inferior teams like the Citadel and Lafayette were the Quakers able to really play well the whole game.
If Penn had won any of the six games it should have -- Duke and Villanova aside -- it would not have been banished to a road game against a team that gave them major match-up problems.
And if the Quakers could have made some big plays against Texas, like if senior guard Eric Osmundson had made his missed three-pointer when the score was 41-40, or maybe if the team had gotten just one or two more stops after that, things could have been different.
I couldn't help thinking that maybe if Penn had substituted Princeton's team into the game with five minutes left, the Tigers might have pulled out for the upset.
After all, Princeton rescued what was the worst season in its school's history by pulling through with a 10-4 conference mark, helped by four wins that were the results of clutch shooting.
Last season's Ivy champs were slightly more consistent. But they couldn't even get to that point against a physically superior Boston College team last tournament.
This year's Quakers showed more heart and grit than that team did. They had a tougher defense and played better against the top teams than the 2004-05 team.
I think that every Quakers fan would rather experience Friday's game than last year's demolition in Cleveland, but when you think about it, the Texas game was no different than the rest of the year.
If that is to change for a team that will return five of its top seven contributors next year, maybe it's time to play that driveway game where you have to make the shot with the clock ticking down and the game on the line.
Penn must keep playing until the shot goes in. Then when it counts, maybe the shot will finally fall for the Quakers and their tournament weekends won't be so short.
Josh Hirsch is a junior urban studies major from Roslyn, N.Y., and former Senior Sports Editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian. His e-mail address is jjhirsch@sas.upenn.edu.
