UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- Winter has enforced its typically brutal lockdown at Penn State, where the biting cold, the slush-gray sky and the hardened faces of overworked students headed to the day's first classes all reflect the grim presumption that spring's just about an eon away.

	Matt Freed, Post-Gazette Click photo for larger image. "I'm still very passionate about making something great happen here. ... I'll at least know that I put the bat in my hands and went to the batters box." --Ed DeChellis

It is not yet 9 a.m., but Ed DeChellis already has been in his office for hours. He was there well after 1 a.m. the night before as well, going over tape of the Penn State-Illinois game, in which the No. 1 team so overmatched DeChellis' Nittany Lions that the crowd at the Bryce Jordan Center seemed as interested in a courtside wing-eating contest as in the fact that Penn State's players couldn't get close enough to Illinois' ultra-quick athletes to even apply any defensive principles.

In one startling sequence, Dee Brown, the spectacular Illinois point guard, took a long defensive rebound near the top of the circle and started up court into a den of Lions. Brown was 1 on 3 and he beat all three to the hoop.

DeChellis grew up in Monaca, never figuring he would end up as one of those guys who was always trying to answer The Question.

The Question seems ageless now, not that it predates the chicken-egg conundrum, but long enough to make the if-a-tree-falls-in-the-forest thing look almost fresh. The Question -- why isn't Penn State any good at basketball? -- has walked this campus like a specter for generations. The program on its way to a fourth consecutive season with fewer than 10 wins is in no way The Wreck of the Edward DeChellis. The Question dogged John Bach, Dick Harter, Bruce Parkill, Jerry Dunn, and it's as prickly today as it ever has been.

When Psychology Today once designated Happy Valley as the least stressful community in America, all that proved was that Psychology Today never talked to the basketball coach at Penn State.

"First, it's about tradition," DeChellis said, staring into his coffee. "A lot of schools made a commitment to basketball a lot sooner than Penn State realized. We've won one conference championship in 109 years of basketball here. Some of that time we were an independent, but there it is.

"What we're missing -- and this is the biggest thing I have to try and figure out how to fix -- is that young men in our state don't grow up wanting to play for the state university. Look at the rosters across the Big Ten. Dee Brown, Luther Head, James Augustine, they're all from Illinois. Kids in Illinois want to go there, the way kids in Indiana dream of playing for Indiana, the same in Michigan and Ohio.

"My job is to figure out a way to fix that by educating 8th, 9th, and 10th graders across the state with a grassroots campaign, even if I'm only doing it for the guy after me. I'm not naive enough to think that you keep losing and keep this job."

Penn State got to the weekend 7-17 and 1-10 in the Big Ten. There were nine wins last year, seven in each of the two years before that. All of which makes the Sweet 16 team from 2001 appear even more fluky than it already was (those Lions finished 7-9 in the conference).

"The hard part now, because we haven't won for four years, is that it's hard to get kids who want to step out of the box," DeChellis said. "Nobody wants to be the Lone Ranger. Youth today want instant gratification. So it's, 'Yeah, I like you, but I want to go where I can win right away.' "

That's the hard part, and there are plenty of harder parts. Marlon Smith, the sophomore guard from the Bronx, had to stop playing when doctors discovered a partially blocked artery in his brain and put him on blood thinners. DeChellis himself had a cancerous tumor lopped off his bladder in August. At a point when Penn State supposedly has all the pieces in place to compete, including the massive, ornate Jordan Center and a spot in one of nation's power conferences, the program has instead rarely looked so star-crossed.

At any moment, you can look up and see four freshmen on the floor for Penn State, representing DeChellis' first recruiting class, playing with still undeveloped skill and virtually no confidence.

"We have to play with energy and confidence," he said. "You can't flip a switch on that."

What he can do is work. Still stuck on six days off in his first 700 or so days on the job, DeChellis just won't compromise with the current karma of this place.

"I'm still very passionate about making something great happen here," he said as the Lions prepared to leave for games at Northwestern and Michigan. "I'm not going to fail because of lack of hard work. I'll at least know that I put the bat in my hands and went to the batters box."

He smiled at the metaphor; it held the whiff of spring in a place where it seems like spring never comes.