Something pretty exciting starts tonight, and I think you know what it is.
It's the march to a national championship.
A quick search through Wikipedia reveals that the University of Pittsburgh claims 11 team national championships.
Nine of those are football and the other two are men's basketball.
There's a slew of individual national championships (17 in wrestling and 28 in track and field, for example), but in terms of team titles, there are just 11.
In a couple weeks, that number will have a chance to hit a perfect dozen.
Of course, I'm talking about the Pitt women's volleyball team, the No. 1 team in the country who was awarded the No. 1 overall seed in the NCAA Tournament. The Panthers open postseason play against Morehead State tonight at the Petersen Events Center, and if they win that one, they'll get Oklahoma or UTEP on Saturday.
Win that one, and they'll move on to the regional semifinals and, after that, the regional finals - all of which Pitt will host at the Pete. There's a chance that the Panthers could meet SMU in the regional finals, which would be a rubber match between the two teams after each won at home in the regular season.
But that's getting ahead of ourselves; the Pitt women have three games to win before that happens.
I debated putting the volleyball talk in the "One Prediction" section of today's column, but given how my predictions typically go, I decided against it. I can only imagine what I would hear if I predicted the Panthers to win it all and they ended up losing to Morehead State.
All too often, we have a championship-or-bust mentality in this city. I get it. I understand where it comes from. But in too many instances, we apply it to sports - college sports, in particular - where a lot can be accomplished short of a championship. Jamie Dixon's runs of Sweet Sixteen appearances, for instance, were viewed as failures rather than the successes they were, and I think that was when I realized what the mindset was locally.
But in the case of Pitt women's volleyball, it really is championship or bust. This team has to win it all. For this team to be as talented as they are and as dominant as they have been, the only fitting conclusion is for them to be standing on the court in Louisville around 5 pm on Sunday, Dec. 22, hoisting a national championship trophy.
(That's right: the national semifinals and finals are in Louisville, which means the Panthers could meet their arch-nemesis Cardinals on their home court with a championship on the line. Talk about high drama.)
There's just something about this team. They're insanely talented, of course, and they've got a bunch of players - Three? Four? Five? - who are legitimately among the best in the nation. That's a key place to start.
But there's something else about them, and the best way I can describe it is this:
I can't claim to be a volleyball aficionado. My interest in this year's team - as with the teams of the last few years - is largely tied to the team's success, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But what I can see, and what I think just about any sports fan can see, is that this team has an ability to seemingly decide at any point to straight-up kill an opponent.
I saw it a number of times this season. Pitt would be facing a lesser opponent, and that lesser opponent might score a few consecutive points or get a little momentum, and it was at that moment that Pitt decided the momentum needed to end.
And it would always end with the Panthers putting their collective foot on the collective neck of the other team.
That's how you get through an entire season and only lose 10 sets in 30 matches. You don't just beat teams; you punish them. The only team that beat Pitt all season was SMU; the only other times an opponent won more than one set against the Panthers was in their home wins over Louisville and Georgia Tech.
So, in 30 matches, only six teams managed to win a set against Pitt and only three won more than one set.
You want to know how I know that this team is on the verge of something great? We're 48 hours removed from Signing Day, one of the high holies of the college sports calendar, and I just used the first section of this column to talk about volleyball.