Looking a few rows up as the Penn football team assembled for their annual photo, the first thing that caught my eye was the hair.
It had a certain wavy thickness and was a certain shade of blond that I would have expected to see on a surfer from California, rather than a football player from North Carolina.
I'd never before seen the kid, who turned out to be Kyle Derham - a freshman wide receiver out of Charlotte, N.C.
But I had seen that uniform before.
Derham had been given No. 31. Kyle Ambrogi's number.
Last year, the two digits represented a life lost too soon and eventually what this year's captain Sean Estrada called "a death blow" in Penn's lost season, which saw them finish with four straight losses.
Now, just 10 1/2 months after Ambrogi's suicide, the number represents hope. In this case, hope is a blond-haired 19-year-old, who never played with Ambrogi and has the best four years of his life ahead of him. And who knows? Maybe four Ivy League titles.
Right now, the focus in the football program is on winning this year and on forgetting last season's 5-5 campaign that produced more tears than happy memories.
"Last year, there was such an asterisk put after the season. After everything that had happened to a lot of us, football became secondary," said coach Al Bagnoli, who returns for his 15th season. "We're just trying to forget last year, trying to get our kids re-energized and refocused and get the emotion back."
August in the college-football landscape is a season of hope when coaches at even the most hopeless of schools fill their teams with the messages of an 0-0 record. Dartmouth and Columbia have the same record that Harvard does. Army and Temple the same as Notre Dame.
But unlike those underdogs, Bagnoli's message can't be sent with just a team trip to see the movie Invincible.
Bagnoli and his 100 players dealt with life and death last year. Now, three-quarters of them return needing to put the loss of a friend behind them and put an Ivy League title ahead of them.
But Bagnoli has some help from his captains in spreading the message of moving on.
"We lost our focus because of the off-the-field stuff last year, and this year, we're turning that around," said Estrada, who will captain the 2006 team along with Scott Williams.
Now, just about a dozen practices into the season, the players have not forgotten about their friend and teammate. Really, who could in that situation? But they have done the best thing actually within the realm of human possibility: They're focused on every play, on every assignment, on every sprint during practice. They're focused not on 31, but on a different number.
"We came here to go 10-0," Estrada said. "We didn't come here to lose to Princeton, Cornell and Villanova."
Now the Quakers seem to be at the point where what could stand between them and perfection won't be so much emotions, but rather a young secondary, an inexperienced quarterback - whomever that may be - and an eternally-iffy kicking game.
And by anyone's account, those are better problems to have.
Zachary Levine is a senior mathemetics major from Delmar, N.Y. and former Sports Editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian. He can be reached at zlevine@sas.upenn.edu.
