DALLAS -- Bigfoot, the ghosts of the Palestra and the perfect game in the NCAA Tournament.
If you ask the right people the right questions, you'll find that all of these exist.
Show me any Philadelphian who was around in 1985 and watched eighth-seeded Villanova shoot 90 percent in the second half to beat No. 1 Georgetown, and I'll show you a believer in the perfect game.
And the Quakers had their fair share of believers on both sides of the fence heading into Friday night.
Those who were less skeptical -- the players themselves -- believed that they had it in them to play the perfect game.
Those who were more skeptical believed that it would take something on a mythological scale to take down Texas.
And they came that close to doing just that.
"We were right there," senior guard Eric Osmundson said. "What it came down to was a couple of loose balls here and a couple of rebounds there that would have pushed us over the ledge."
But as Osmundson said, the truth is that Penn did not play the perfect game.
In a perfect game, Osmundson's three when the Quakers were down 41-40 at 6:38 in the second half wouldn't rattle out. In a perfect game, Penn would shoot better than 28 percent in the first half. And in a perfect game, Penn wouldn't get doubled in rebounding -- even against a team that could compete with the New York Knicks.
But this is the closest any Quakers team has come in quite a while to putting together a perfect 40 minutes of basketball on college hoops' biggest stage.
It started at the top with coach Fran Dunphy, whose gameplan of shortening the game through drawn-out possessions and limiting Texas' touches under the basket nearly worked to perfection.
And then the credit goes to the players on the floor. The 6-foot-7 Mark Zoller needed to hit all three of his three-pointers, so the junior forward hit all three of his three-pointers.
"I think a perfect game is just everybody being on the same page, doing what you need to do," said junior guard Ibrahim Jaaber, who had a few near-perfect games of his own this year.
"In many ways, we did that, except for making the big shots down the stretch."
Down the line, seven men deep, everybody was on the same page, buying into the game plan and doing his part.
Junior forward Steve Danley was told not to take any shots that he wasn't sure he could make. He was held scoreless, but that didn't stop him from leading the Quakers in assists and rebounds and making sure Texas' imposing center LaMarcus Aldridge was taking eight-footers instead of dunks.
But against the Big 12 champions, playing close to a perfect game wasn't enough to get the job done.
"That's why they're top Division-I athletes," Osmundson said. "They get the fastest, quickest, tallest players."
It's funny that Penn chose to play to near-perfection against Texas when you consider that in losses to Columbia or Princeton, perfection wasn't necessary, greatness wasn't called for, and mediocrity might have gotten the job done.
But this wasn't February at Levien Gymnasium, it was the NCAA Tournament, the Big Dance.
Where the perfect game can go from being a myth to a reality.
And where, on a rainy night in Dallas, the Quakers found out just how difficult a reality that is to achieve.
Zachary Levine is a junior mathematics major from Delmar, N.Y., and former Sports Editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian. His e-mail address is zlevine@sas.upenn.edu.
