If you’re a Pitt football fan, where will you be the day after Christmas?

Will you be at Detroit’s Ford Field to watch the Panthers take on Toledo in the GameAbove Bowl?

No? I can’t say that I blame you. Yes? I suppose I admire your loyalty and dedication.

No offense to the city of Detroit, the GameAbove Bowl and Toledo, but as a diehard fan of the Pitt football program, I was hoping for so much more.

After the Panthers got off to a surprising 7-0 start–their best since 1982–visions of a spot in the first-ever 12-team college football national championship playoff began to dance in my head. Perhaps it was a bit unrealistic. Perhaps Pitt was whistling past the graveyard with the way it was coming back from multi-score deficits to defeat the likes of Cincinnati and West Virginia. But I couldn’t help it. I mean, why not us? Why does Pitt always have to be, well, you know what rhymes with that?

Even after the first loss or two, I was hoping for a more glamorous bowl, like the Holiday Bowl or the Sun Bowl. I wanted to see the Panthers go up against a formidable opponent that hailed from a Power Five conference.

Instead, it’s Toledo, a football program that hails from the MAC. Hell, Toledo didn’t even have a dream season. Instead, it finished with the same 7-5 record as the Panthers, who took that 7-0 start and pretty much turned it into nothing.

The Rockets (that’s Toledo’s nickname, FYI) didn’t even win the MAC. No, they finished sixth. That’s right. the Panthers, a middling school from the ACC, are going to play the Rockets, a middling school from the MAC, in a bowl game in Detroit, Michigan.

If you’re the Panthers, how can you go from dreaming the impossible to finishing your season in Detroit? How do you not only collapse but do so in the worst possible way? Not even the most pessimistic Pitt supporter could have envisioned such an anti-climatic ending to the 2024 campaign.

Oh well, there’s always next year. There’s always the chance that the Panthers will once again end their season in the Tony the Tiger Sun Bowl. That doesn’t seem so bad after the GameAbove Bowl, now does it?