It is usually easy to pinpoint the end of a dynasty.
For the Yankees, it was Luis Gonzalez's hit in Game 7 of the 2001 World Series. For the Bulls, it was Michael Jordan's second retirement. For the Philadelphia Republicans, it was the 1951 election.
For the Penn football team, the date is a little harder to pinpoint; the end of its dynasty earlier this decade has been more of a process than an event.
But if you had to put an exact lifespan on the Quakers dynasty, it would be the following:
Oct. 28, 2000 - Oct. 28, 2006
Six years ago this week, the Quakers were looking very undynasty-like, falling behind Brown 38-20 with five minutes to play. But 21 straight points turned into the first of 29 wins in 30 Ivy games, including three championships.
The end, again, is not so easy to define. Until Saturday, I was willing to give Penn the benefit of the doubt.
In 2004, when the Quakers lost the Ivy title in a Week 9 showdown against Harvard, they were missing their starting quarterback and ran into a team with an NFL-bound quarterback and possibly the best fantasy running back in Ivy League history.
After speaking with Al Bagnoli and some players about the emotional toll, I was willing to dismiss the four-game losing streak last season after the suicide of Kyle Ambrogi.
I allowed for one fluke last week on the road, in the elements against Yale. But they can't fool me twice.
As Steve Morgan's 25-yard field goal sailed through the uprights in overtime over the weekend, the dynasty was dead, six years to the day it was born.
The signs have been there for a while. I wrote two weeks ago that the Quakers' close games early in the season were a good thing because they would teach them how to win. The last two weeks show that all they really demonstrated was that the team isn't all that good.
While watching the homecoming game on Saturday, I had a very telling conversation with a recent graduate that went something like this:
Recent grad: Who are the pro prospects on this team?
Me: Uh .
It wasn't long ago that the Quakers sent the likes of Ben Noll, Rob Milanese, Jim Finn, Jeff Hatch and Stephen Faulk to the NFL. But lately, the only ones playing on Sundays are playing in fantasy leagues, and that doesn't show many signs of changing.
So, is the moral of the story that the sky is falling? Absolutely not. Cloudy, yes. Falling, no.
All one must do is consider the fact that Dartmouth has won the most Ivy League titles to realize that this league goes in cycles. Unless your team wears light blue and plays in Manhattan, it's been an up-and-down half-century in the Ivy League. And Penn, which has been up more or less throughout the entire Bagnoli era, has hit a trough.
Fortunately for the Quakers, it appears to be just that - a trough - rather than a point along a much greater descent.
The team has an all-league quarterback in Robert Irvin if he can learn when to take a sack and when and where to get rid of the ball. Bagnoli and running-backs coach Steven Downs have had two years to groom Kelms Amoo-Achampong as a replacement for Joe Sandberg.
Starters Tyson Maugle, Jordan Manning and Greg Ambrogi will return to the secondary next year, and the defensive line still has some talent coming back.
The sky is certainly not falling. There's no reason to panic; no reason to fire a head coach over a losing season-and-a-half.
As the Quakers closed the books on an era Saturday, they presented Bagnoli not with a pink slip, but with an opportunity.
The Quakers have been in a trough before.
The year was 1991, when they went 2-5 in the Ivy League. The following offseason, they turned to a coach who, a decade earlier, took a Division III Union program that hadn't had a winning season in 12 years and produced an 8-1 team.
That coach reversed Penn's direction as well, and the Quakers went 24-4 in the next four seasons, bringing two Ivy League titles home to Philadelphia.
This year's team faces a very real possibility of going 2-5. Time to fire the current coach and hire that miracle worker?
Not really. They're the same person.
So, it's very possible that, while the dynasty is over, a new one could be right around the corner.
Zachary Levine is a senior mathematics major from Delmar, N.Y., and is former Sports Editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian. His e-mail address is zlevine@sas.upenn.edu.
