Same as it ever was

WEST LAFAYETTE -- The good guy was gunned down Saturday at high noon outside the Tippecanoe County Courthouse. The West Lafayette townspeople rejoiced as the bystanders from Bloomington recoiled back to reality. A man on horseback was quickly dispatched to Quarry Land with one message: Hoosier down, Boiler up. Same as it ever was.\nWith all said and done, the Hoosiers had three games, three chances to change. But the football team failed to make the miracle happen, and now Hoosier heroics lie desolate throughout the Bloomington landscape. \nThere are intangibles, certain intricacies people possess. Intangibles are the reasons that all results are reached. Simply put, those intangibles, which wield winners, did not lie inside the crimson hearts of these Hoosiers. That desire designates a sixth win and a 13th game. Instead, Saturday it was the same as it ever was.\nWest Lafayette is the antithesis of Bloomington. It's a barren wasteland of brick. It is an ugly campus masked only by its excess of male students. In a way, PurDude is a sort of Bizzaro Bloomington. But the boys of Brickville made losers out of our Hoosiers. As I previewed before the Minnesota matchup, these improbable champs pumpkin'd into chumps and shattered the Cinderella dream of a bowl berth. \nThen again, perhaps the Hoosiers' dreams died at the hands of bad timing. The game's noon starting time was misconstrued as the stroke of midnight. The spell has broken, and with it, every form the football team has taken this season has fallen apart. The wagons' wheels are broken and the S.S. IU has sunk straight to the ocean floor. These once-rocket men prematurely exploded as their shelter was stripped away. \nA question was posed to the IU football players a few weeks ago. Their answer is a 13th straight year bowl-barren in Bloomington -- same as it ever was. \nThere I found myself inside a press room of Ross-Ade Stadium. I watched as the media harassed a hoarse-voiced coach Terry Hoeppner. I watched a man whose face defined the word exhaustion answer to talking heads full of finely tuned what-if questions. It was then that I asked myself, "How did I get here?" Letting the days go by, I assumed that the arrival of coach Hep would halt the historic mediocrity of IU football. But what I found out while sitting inside that press room Saturday is that this type of change isn't easy.\nThe two years I have covered the IU football team provided me a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I have seen this team stun the Kentucky Wildcats, only to lie down stunned by six straight losses in the remainder of its Big Ten schedule. I have seen this team sign its season away to the Southern Illinois Salukis, only to serve a hot dish of humiliation to the nationally ranked Iowa Hawkeyes weeks later. But out of the dust came the dismal, and I am left disappointed. The good guy was gunned down Saturday at high noon outside the Tippecanoe County Courthouse, and for two years, I've witnessed the man packing the pistol. \nOn Saturday, the Hoosiers were stopped on 4th-and-1 on their final offensive play of the season. They needed one yard. They needed one game. But they fell short, as I finally realized how I had gotten here.\nSame as it ever was.