Just after 3 p.m. on Jan. 12, the Penn State men's basketball team reached the high-water mark of its 2007-2008 season.
The Nittany Lions were 10-4 and had opened Big Ten play with consecutive road victories. They were dominating Minnesota in front of a crowd of almost 11,000 fans, who were poised to see their Lions enter seemingly uncharted territory for Penn State basketball -- an eight-game winning streak.
But it never happened. That night, the Lions embarked on a run of flawless futility, dropping every game since. On Tuesday night, with a chance to end the skid against Ohio State, they turned a four-point lead into a 12-point deficit in 10 scoreless minutes. Such is the current state of Penn State basketball.
Now, the Lions have to settle for moral victories, or at least a noticeable improvement from their younger players. Andrew Jones showed a glimpse of that on Tuesday with his first career double-double, but it wasn't enough to carry Penn State past Ohio State.
"It's fun being out there with those guys contributing to the success of the team," Jones said.
Success wasn't the right word, but Jones' performance did give some hope for the future, even though the present is all but a lost cause.
Everything collapsed quicker than you could say Blake Hoffarber. Against Penn State, Minnesota's sharp-shooting guard caught fire to help erase a 16-point second half deficit and extinguish the scorching Lions. Penn State never regained the momentum it had built.
The season (or at least any hope of reaching the lofty goals coach Ed DeChellis had set for the team) ended three days later when swingman Geary Claxton, the keystone to the Lions' success, took an awkward fall and injured his left knee.
Game over. There's always next year.
Choking against Minnesota was bad, but Penn State could have gotten over it. Not the loss of Claxton, though. That was the nail in the coffin.
"It is going to be a long couple days," DeChellis said following Claxton's injury.
Try weeks. Penn State hasn't won since Jan. 6, and it's hard to see a victory on the horizon if
the team continues to play like it has.
The Lions have lost six in a row. The last five defeats have been by an average margin of 18 points, capped off by Tuesday night's 10-minute-long goose egg.
More than a quarter of the game without a single point. That doesn't happen if Claxton's in the lineup. When he's not, the rest of the team seems more inclined to play the entire second half with their hands clutched around their throats than to take control of the game. Penn State desperately needs someone to step up and become the go-to scoring threat because it's yet to happen.
The students know it, too. Their team is in the thick of conference play, but you wouldn't know it by looking at the sea of empty blue seats in the Bryce Jordan Center. Even the Target 10 Challenge, which supported Thon -- as good a cause as you'll find on campus -- fell almost 4,000 student tickets short of its goal.
When you can't even fill seats for Thon, you're in trouble. When the student body's level of interest in Penn State basketball can best be described as "apathetic," things are as bleak as they get.
And it only took a little more than 72 hours for it all to fall apart.
