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Winning in a blowout in the season opener sure is nice, isn't it?

I'll admit, after Pitt's first TD I was afraid the game would become a track meet and they would just throw at Richardson all night. God knows they should have -- when ABC said a "key to victory" for Pitt would be running 60% of the time I thought, please do that because it'll give us a chance! Instead, for the first time in a long time, we answered a deficit and took over a game that last year we would have let get out of hand. And by the time we took the second half kickoff and put together a seven minute TD drive, I knew it wasn't a fluke. It's nice that the second string got a couple of possessions, but it would be even nicer to see how they looked. Between ABC breaking in with news of Rehnquist's death -- and the accompanying, completely unnecessary biography -- and switching to the end of the Clemson game, we missed most of the fourth quarter! There is no excuse for that when watching on satellite. If I wanted to see some sorry ACC team I would have stayed home and watched free TV.

But I don't want to get too giddy. This is how things are supposed to be. We used to routinely score in the 40s in the opener -- granted against Northwestern, but the point is the team was prepared at the beginning of the season. And not blowing out -- much less losing to -- Pitt shouldn't even enter our consciousness. Between 1988 and 1996 we played Pitt 7 times and won 'em all by an average score of 43-12. So even if we're not all the way back yet, we're getting there. And in any game, I'll be happy when the postmortem is along the lines of this from the Chicago Tribune:

"By the end, Notre Dame's domination was absolute, Pitt's disintegration complete."