Four thousand, seven hundred and sixty-four minutes of Dan Cepero's life were spent in a very familiar place.
For more than 79 hours in the last four years, he was in goal for the Penn soccer team, putting his name all over the record books.
But yesterday, he was in a very unfamiliar place - the men's basketball lounge of the Palestra, watching as team after team filled the rapidly dwindling number of spots in the NCAA Tournament bracket.
And, in 10 minutes, it was all over. It wasn't a place where any soccer player's career should take him. And it wasn't the way any athlete should see 4,764 minutes of hard work come to a sudden end.
"It's tough," Cepero said. "It's a draining experience when you spend so much time on the soccer field. You just envision your career ending on the field after the whistle has blown."
Ditto Andy Howard. Ditto Ryan Tracy.
The telecast on ESPNEWS flew by. There was little time to analyze the Quakers' chances as at-large Brown went up on the board. And there was no knowing that the last panel of teams on the board would be all Northeast matchups.
Connecticut, Fairfield, Providence and Hofstra came up. Pennsylvania did not.
"We were kind of hoping that the last set of brackets had our name on it," Cepero said. "With each time, obviously, there's a little bit more stress involved."
Stress quickly turned into many other emotions inside the closed-door gathering in the Palestra.
"I thanked the seniors for what they've done over the past four years," Penn coach Rudy Fuller said. "They had a very good run."
For Cepero, the chance to have one last team meeting in that intimate setting took a little bit of the sting off a day he'd otherwise remember for all the wrong reasons.
"It's disappointing, but having the encouragement and the intimate setting to hear from your teammates and your coaches how much they respect you meant a lot," he said. "So I guess that's a silver lining."
But ask Fuller, and he'll tell you that yesterday should not be remembered as a sad or bitter day.
For a coach whose teams have been a combined 20-36-7 in the Ivy League during his nine-year tenure, it was nice to see this one have a chance at seeing a tomorrow for the first time since 2002.
"If you asked them, and the choice was to have their season end with certainty in the last game or have an opportunity to wait and see, I think anybody would choose to wait and see if they could extend the season," Fuller said.
They didn't have to wait long. Forty-nine hours after Kevin Unger's match-winning goal at Princeton, the selection show began. Ten minutes later, the dream was gone.
But as far as time goes, that has nothing on the 4,764 minutes. Those are the ones that will be remembered.
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.
