This was the day they would have spent happily exploring the curtained catacombs of Final Four festooned Ford Field in Detroit, finding their locker room, smiling through SRO news conferences, thumping basketballs off the stage where the national championship will be decided, maybe even trying to figure out approximately where Hines Ward crossed the goal line to win Super Bowl XL.

But the Pitt Panthers are home today, still trying to peel the hurt from last weekend's two-point loss to Villanova, and couldn't you just tell by the faces of Jamie Dixon and Levance Fields and Sam Young that the peeling would be an arduous process that might just well be interminable, like defoliating with your fingernail the painted side of a battleship?

On TV, they show the coach's face and the players' faces, but no one saw Steve Pederson's face.

"I was sitting about five rows up from the floor," Pitt's athletic director was saying in his office yesterday. "The minute it ended, I went down and hopped over a railing and went straight to the locker room. I thought my job at that moment was to tell them all how proud I was of them. Talk about what a great season it was, but you know, I should keep this in perspective more than anyone."

Pederson is in his second term as Pitt's athletic czar, and plenty has changed since his first ended in 2002. Though he's facing the likely end of the glorious LeSean-DeJuan Era, with All-American football and basketball studs LeSean McCoy and DeJuan Blair leaving for professional leagues before the next school year, the AD is convinced Pitt's image suffered no additional trauma in the five fateful seconds against Villanova.

Quite the contrary.

"The president of the United States put Pitt in the Final Four in this bracket; he wrote our name on it and talked about our players," Pederson said definitively. "These things have impact. I mean, to get to the Elite 8, to play the way we did, to sit in a press conference last Saturday and have most of the national media framing questions as though Pitt had just been in one of the great NCAA tournament games ever played, people would have to see this as one of the elite programs."

Pitt often has approached the kind of national cachet it enjoys today, but it has never enjoyed the kind of sustained basketball excellence that began when Pederson hired Ben Howland and Dixon, his eventual successor, who says it was Pederson who convinced him to come to Pitt in 1999. The fact that Pitt's general academic reputation has been on a similar winning streak in the 14 years under chancellor Mark Nordenberg is not unrelated.

"I firmly believe that students want to come to an excellent school, but also want an excellent social life such as can be provided in part by the athletic teams," said Dr. Susan A. Albrecht, associate dean of Pitt's decorated nursing school and the university's faculty athletic representative. "Seventy-nine percent of our nursing students know they want to attend graduate school, and when you look out at them in the classroom you see the people who are involved in all aspects of campus life, who have their Oakland Zoo T-shirts on, who energize a university."

Pitt's undergraduate applications have spiked to more than 22,000 annually from 8,000 at the start of Nordenberg's term. The number of students coming from the top 10 percent of their high school class has jumped from 22 percent to 46 percent. When, at the same time, you reach No. 1 in the nation in basketball for the first time, when you beat No. 1 in the nation in basketball for the first time, when you get a No. 1 seed in the NCAA tournament for the first time and extend the season to the brink of college basketball's Super Bowl, your achievements are clearly undeniable, but as they always say, it's a tricky business.

Formidable public research institutions with big athletic budgets often rely on athletic success to trade effective education for glowing national image. The cautionary text is Indiana professor Murray Sperber's "Beer and Circus: How Big-Time College Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education." Sperber's applause line goes like this: "Many universities, because of their emphasis on graduate programs and because of their inability to provide quality undergraduate education to most of their students, spend increasing amounts of money on their athletic departments, and use big-time college sports -- commercial entertainment around which many undergraduates organize their hyperactive social lives -- to keep their students happy and distracted and the tuition dollars rolling in."

Pitt appears to have walked this line rather deftly. In undergraduate education, for one example, only nine universities (not counting the service academies) claimed both Rhodes and Marshall Scholars in 2007 -- Cornell, Duke, Georgetown, Harvard, NYU, Princeton, Washington University, Yale and Pitt.

"The athletic department is not more important than anything that goes on at the university, but it is important, and it's often the most visible part," Pederson said. "With everything that's happening here, we're now able to recruit to more widespread university interests. Jamie might be recruiting against North Carolina and Duke, and he can sell an education like North Carolina and Duke."

Pitt's image got itself super-polished over the winter, but all of the university's positive forces appear to have commingled to create a signature momentum for the long term.