Way back in Oc-tober, a month before the season began, the goals of the Penn State men's basketball team were posted on a wall inside its locker room at the Bryce Jordan Center.

Each player wrote his signature on two intentions: Win the Big Ten and make the NCAA tournament.

From the outside, these were quite lofty ambitions. The program had not shown signs of creating that type of March excitement since the 2000-01 season, when Penn State upset No. 5 North Carolina in the second-round of the Big Dance before losing to Temple in its next game, inciting a downtown State College riot.

But on the inside, these players truly believed. When asked, they said as much. The Nittany Lions

had progress on their minds after reaching the postseason NIT a year earlier.

The team graduated just one key player in forward Travis Parker. Leading scorer Geary Claxton and Big Ten Freshman of the Year Jamelle Cornley were returning, along with two other members of the starting lineup and many of the same bench players.

At the very least, there was reason to expect marginal improvement in the conference and overall record.

There certainly wasn't any material that could be used to predict that, by late February, this year's team would have dropped 13 consecutive regular-season games, coming within two losses of tying the 23-year-old school record for such a streak.

That is until -- not too long after Penn State began playing games -- when it lost to Division II Shippensburg in its second exhibition game of the season.

Sure, Penn State was playing without Claxton, who broke his right hand a game earlier, and David "Mooch" Jackson, who was out with a sprained ankle, but that was a game which no Div. I basketball team should ever lose, strictly based on the talent discrepancy of the teams on the floor.

"Even though we didn't have Geary and Mooch, I think that was foretelling of maybe how the season might go," junior guard Mike Walker said earlier this week.

The players could not make such thoughts public, but the loss was a confidence-killer that was never overcome. They weren't yet the type of the team that could just step on the court and beat people; even if they thought they would be able. Subsequent losses at home to Stony Brook and Southeastern Louisiana, teams with current RPIs of 282 and 231, respectively, cooled self-belief further.

Penn State was losing games it should have been winning against low-level competition, not the sign of a team ready to make the jump to meaningful games in March. The Lions finished their non-conference schedule (which featured just one top-25 opponent) with a 10-4 record, a few more losses than intended.

The first win of the Big Ten season, a 26-point victory on Jan. 3 against perennial conference bottom feeder Northwestern, didn't prove to be foretelling of any further results of this team either.

Almost two months later, Penn State finally won a game, against Iowa at home. In the 13 contests between -- some close defeats and others blowouts -- conference opponents exploited the weaknesses that the non-conference opponents revealed.

The defeats, many of which resulted from the Lions' inability to defend using its zone scheme, came in every which way possible. It was crystal clear: Penn State didn't have amazingly bad players. They were just bad at winning.

So imagine the jubilation after the team did manage to win against Iowa. Players already were mentioning the phrases "Big Ten tournament" and "Make some noise" in the same sentence. Maybe, somehow, they could win four games in a row and clinch the automatic bid to the NCAA tournament that the Big Ten men's basketball tournament winner earns.

A run like that would have made for a basketball movie better than "Hoosiers," and that is almost impossible.

Yesterday, hope finally ended in earnest when the Lions lost in the first round of the conference tournament to Illinois at the United Center in Chicago.

After squandering an early advantage and being down at halftime, Penn State scrapped into the second half, slowly cutting into Illinois' 16-point lead with 12:53 remaining and making every possession count in the game's final minutes.

In the end, though, the Lions were one or two baskets, and six points, short. They headed into the unfamiliar locker room in Chicago with a recognizable losing feeling. Again.

And one time zone to the east, inside the Jordan Canter, the signatures on the goals of this year's team officially became insignificant.

"It was disappointing for our expectations," Claxton said yesterday when asked to sum up the season.

But the signs were there early. This Penn State team was not what it thought it was.