According to the script, a few minutes before 1:30 p.m. Saturday, James Conner will emerge from the riverside tunnel at Heinz Field to a loud, proud roar unlike any related to Pitt football in recent memory. His coaches and teammates will align to either side. His school band will blare their horns like never before. His family and friends will be on hand, of course, as well as the doctors who carried him through his triumphant bout with cancer.
According to the script, the ideal script, there won't be an open yellow seat or a single dry eye when the Panthers kick off their 127th season against Villanova.
It'll all be beautiful. Just beautiful.
On Monday at the Duratz Athletic Complex, I asked Pat Narduzzi if he'd allowed that vision to enter his mind. And unsurprisingly, being a football coach, he freely acknowledged it hadn't.
Yet.
"I've got so many other things to think about," Narduzzi began. "You know, when this thing first started, James came up to all of us coaches and said, 'Hey, I'm going to beat this thing. And when I do, I'm going to tell a story.' So, to me, that'll be the last chapter, when he walks back out on that football field."
He paused a moment.
"Yeah, it'll be emotional. For him. For our football team. Certainly for me. But I haven't really thought about it. I'll probably be thinking about it a lot the night before."
Another pause.
"He's a football player. Maybe there will be another chapter in the end."
Right. The part where he does this again:
Where it's just about football, not just for Conner but for everyone involved and invested in the Pitt program.
Because soon after that ball flies into the North Shore air, we'll have at least some clue as to whether all concerned can harness all this energy, all this enthusiasm that's there to be had entering 2016, from Conner's return to Narduzzi's pump-it-up presence to the rebirth of the Penn State rivalry to the boost in ticket sales that might or might not have anything to do with the Nittany Lions ... whether they can take all that and start steamrolling toward a truly successful season.
And what, exactly, does that entail for Pitt?
That might be harder than ever to answer, as this list can only begin to illustrate:
Why rewind to 2010?
Well, that's the season that the Panthers' faithful essentially set their own bar, chasing out Dave Wannstedt after full seasons of nine and 10 wins, with the mindset that, swell soldier and all, he couldn't win the big one. And, not to rub it in, those Wannstedt plateaus remain untouched by any of his successors.
All seven of his successors!
And yeah, even though some wise guy has momentarily wiped Mike Haywood from the all-time roster of Pitt head coaches in the wild world of Wikipedia, he counts every bit as much as Todd Graham, Paul Chryst and three interim choices in Phil Bennett, Keith Patterson and Joe Rudolph.
Again, not to rub it in, but that's been the bar since Wannstedt's exit. It's been those six coaches, a couple of them outright cretins. It's been a whole lot of 6-6. It's been a whole lot of ambivalence at home games. It's been a program that lost its way, if not its Compass.
Now, enter Narduzzi with an uplifting 2015 in which the Panthers finally started clinging to leads rather than coughing them up.
Now, re-enter Conner and all the rest, an effect that might have been best summarized Monday by senior linebacker Matt Galambos:
https://vimeo.com/180628970
It could be a better team. Or "much better," as another senior, wide receiver Dontez Ford, unflinchingly put it when I asked. For sore, it's more feasible than fairy tale.
On offense, in addition to Conner, a back so bruising he provides his own blocking, there's exceptional depth at running back highlighted not so much by Qadree Ollison, the ACC's offensive rookie of the year in 2015, but by the fact that Ollison popped up fourth on the RB depth chart Monday morning. This despite Narduzzi proclaiming that "he's had a great camp." There's also a line with 99 combined starts, 12th most in the nation for any blocks that might actually be needed. And there's a pro-style quarterback in Nate Peterman, who's got a tremendous relationship with his coordinator, Matt Canada.
Sure, there are issues, chief among them replacing Tyler Boyd's splash and safety-valve plays. He excelled at both. But show me a college offense that can bulldoze, and I'll show you an opponent that's waving a white towel by the third quarter.
"We don't have to be Tyler, and we don't have to replace Tyler's production," Ford said. "We know what kind of offense we can have."
Photos from Pitt's practices on the South Side. - MATT SUNDAY / DKPSAnd who's that?
"You'll see."
That feels like an echo of Narduzzi's ice-cool stance. This coach isn't boasting about setting some new high-octane standard or any other such nonsense. It's not his style, and it really wouldn't be needed, anyway. What impressed Pitt fans the most last season wasn't any rhetoric. It was all the rallies. All the burying of opponents once there was a lead. All the that-was-the-most-Pitt-thing-ever narratives biting the dust.
But OK, if they won't set the bar, what's stopping me or any of us?
It starts this weekend, as Narduzzi reminded us only a billion times Monday, but Penn State's next. No need to elaborate on what they could mean in the short and long terms. Beyond that, winning the Coastal Division gets the Panthers into the ACC championship game. North Carolina and Miami were picked ahead of them in the preseason poll, but the broader consensus remains that the division's wide open.
And here's guessing the poll couldn't have accounted for all that Conner brings. He'll need tractor-trailers to haul all those intangibles down Tony Dorsett Drive this weekend.
TOMORROW: Morgantown, W.Va.
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