It's next to impossible to go undefeated in a college basketball season, and few pundits were expecting the Syracuse Orange to roll through the 16-team Big East without a single blemish on their ledger sheet. With that having been said, nobody saw this Saturday's stunner at the Carrier Dome, with the exception of the Pittsburgh Panthers.

And even they had to wonder if they could stroll into upstate New York and hand Jim Boeheim his first loss in 14 games.

Just how fragile was Pitt heading into its first game of 2010? The Panthers owned an 11-2 record, but that mark was built almost entirely on cupcakes. Coach Jamie Dixon's team scored a solid 68-55 win over Wichita State on Nov. 23, and that 13-point pasting of a Missouri Valley Conference contender represented the best thing Pitt had done up to this point in its campaign. Victories over Duquesne and Wofford were nothing to sneeze at, but the point remained that the Panthers were a far cry from last season's squad, a loaded ballclub that reached the Elite Eight and narrowly lost to Villanova in the East Regional Final.

Pitt dropped its biggest showdown to Texas on Nov. 24, an entirely expected result for a team that's retooling. However, a Dec. 8 loss to Indiana in New York indicated just how much of a drop-off the Panthers had to contend with. As they made the trip to Syracuse, the boys from Western Pennsylvania couldn't have felt too confident about their prospects. No longer equipped with the terrific triumvirate of guard Levance Fields, forward Sam Young, and space-eating, rebound-gobbling center DeJuan Blair, a smaller and less proven Pittsburgh outfit had to take on an Orange outfit that knocked around North Carolina, clobbered California, and foiled Florida.