Eagles take the field on December 28 for the 2007 Champs Sports Bowl. Photograph: Ian Thomas/The Heights

Let’s not kid ourselves; it was a remarkable season: 11 wins, a division championship, an eighth consecutive bowl victory, an AP final ranking at number 10, a Manning Award for the quarterback, and flashes of the kind of offensive daring that would seem to vindicate an administrative decision made about a year ago to allow the departure of the coach who’d directed those previous seven bowl wins. And that coach, it needs be remembered, took over the Eagles in the wake of a rare and dismaying college football betting scandal during the 1996 season that had local op-ed prophets rending clothes, chewing ashes, and predicting a 10-year drought in respectability for the football Eagles, if not the deluge. Tom O’Brien—he of the under-admired taut jaw—then arrived, and Boston College football was turned around in three years.

But if, in spite of the high notes, 2007 felt something like a tie score in the end, there were sound reasons for that as well: a precipitous slide from a hubris-inducing perch at number 2; a you-can-bring-him-home-to-Mom-or-Dad-or-anybody quarterback who didn’t garner the hoped-for Heisman votes; and an ACC championship game lost to Virginia Tech, a team that has slipped into Syracuse’s once unassailable place, in Big East days, as the squad we seem to play too often. Moreover, that game, if won, would have propelled Boston College into its first high-consequence bowl game (Orange) since the 1985 Cotton Bowl, and before that the 1943 Orange Bowl, and would have signaled the arrival of the post-O’Brien era—an envisioned golden age during which Boston College’s football teams would finally “play all four quarters” or cliché of your choice.

Getting knocked out of contention for the Orange Bowl certainly was a blow to spirits—though not, it needs be said, to the bottom line, for in the collectivist ACC, net bowl income is shared equally by Virginia Tech and Duke and everyone in between. That injury of a lost premier bowl slot, however, soon seemed as nothing compared with the insult of waiting by the phone to see which of the second-tier suitors would now invite us to the prom, and then to learn that the desirable New Year’s Eve Chick-Fil-A Peach Bowl had passed over the Eagles for Clemson, a team we’d beaten this year, and in their home stadium, the fearsome “Death Valley,” no less. “We have an obligation to hotels, restaurants, and retailers,” said an honest Chick-Fil-A spokesman; and Boston College, as is too often said, also honestly, “doesn’t travel well,” by which it is meant that Boston College alumni and students prefer hearth to hotels from Christmas Eve to New Year’s Eve. (And yes, it’s supposed to be a put-down.) And if that were not enough beach sand in the face, Virginia—another ACC inferior—then got itself invited to the Gator Bowl.

And so, on the resonant-less date of December 28, our young men dressed for the Champs Bowl, where our opponent was Michigan State, a team that had won seven games in 2007. And we beat them. And the Chick-Fil-A guy was right. Of 12,500 tickets in Boston College’s allotment to Champs, 5,000 were bought by alumni or students who intended to go to the game. Meanwhile, Clemson sold its 17,500 Chick-Fil-A tickets in less than 24 hours.

When I arrived at the Heights, in November 1978, traveling well wasn’t an issue. Not only hadn’t the Eagles played in a bowl game since American armed forces were securing Guadalcanal, but the football program was about to become famous for going 0–11, after which the coach was dismissed, after which team members protested to the athletic director (it was their fault, not Coach’s), with the result that the AD rehired the coach.

This touching tale made national news, though no one would have mistaken its theme for a winning football strategy. The 0–11 coach lasted two more seasons before becoming, I have to believe, the only head football coach in the history of the NCAA to be let go twice by the same college over the course of three consecutive years of service.

Douglas Richard Flutie ’85 shook matters up in the early 1980s, but was an anomaly, a first-tier college player at an institution with second-tier training facilities (to be generous to the late Roberts Center) and a rather rustic 32,000-seat stadium. A stunning facilities upgrade (Conte Forum and Alumni Stadium) in the late 1980s finally jerked Boston College football out of the Dink Stover era and gave the program half a chance to succeed in the brave new world of nationwide recruiting, cable broadcasting, the attentions of professional football, and training staffs with specialists seemingly devoted to each major muscle group. Newly fortified, the Eagles did well under the martinet Tom Coughlin (1991–93), but then collapsed, and ignobly, under the agreeable Dan Henning (1994–96). And then along came another stickler, Tom O’Brien, in December 1996, and Gene DiFilippo (an outwardly amiable stickler) in September 1997, who as athletics director buttressed facilities, logos, staff, uniforms, marketing, sales, academic advising, faculty oversight, and fundraising, and one result has been a series of fat years for football—the most successful run of seasons for Boston College ever.

And so now what? Or as Kant once wondered in another context: “What may I hope?”

Thirty years ago, the hope was that Boston College would again field a nationally competitive team, as in the days of leather helmets and the fearsome Cornell Big Red. That hope having, over decades, and in a series of halting steps, been achieved, the new hope seems to be fielding a team that can find its way into a consequential bowl game on a regular basis, which may to some excitable, blog befuddled minds mean that BC is at last on its destined way to becoming Michigan (420,000 alumni), Texas (39,000 undergraduates), or Alabama (92,138 in attendance at last spring’s inter-squad scrimmage), but to most of us with a hold on reason indicates a desire to be somewhat better at winning football games in future than we have been in past, which would make us very good, indeed. Clearly the replacement of Tom O’Brien with Jeff Jagodzinski was intended to signal that we had adopted a more stringent definition of football success.

Whether it was reasonable to assume this ambition, I don’t know. But in supposing that it might have been, I am less influenced by the fact that we nearly marched into the Orange Bowl this year as I am by my memory of a football coach a few years back who would often complain that academic expectations of athletes were set so absurdly high here that he could not enroll the guys he needed to be consistently competitive. I believed him, and so did many others. It was, in fact, sadly accepted wisdom in the Boston College circles in which I moved. Who did we think we could be? Stanford? Notre Dame? A similar complaint, however, if voiced by any BC football coach today, would hardly seem anything but disingenuous (and if whined publicly, would, I imagine, lead to a review of his long-term, if not short-term, prospects in Chestnut Hill). As most of us know, the successes of the past eight years have been achieved with students on football scholarships who graduated at NCAA-calculated rates that averaged 94 percent in the past six years, and 89 percent overall, and with “football recruiting classes” that, unlike the team itself, very seldom broke into top-25 lists. (The Division IA football graduation rate averages 67 percent, but as analysts of the game note in newspaper columns every bowl season, winning teams tend to have an unsavory habit of flying below average.)

I’ll admit to not being much of a college football devotee (the game where I grew up was basketball). But just as I, without being particularly science-minded, like the idea that Boston College—which isn’t MIT—aims to take a leading position in the United States in interdisciplinary natural science, so do I enjoy the notion that Boston College—which isn’t Ohio State—has set itself to meet a standard for football that is higher than anything previously accomplished in Alumni Stadium and in those unseductive arenas to which I, and many others, have never traveled, higher maybe than anywhere.

Read more by Ben Birnbaum