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As heartbreaking as the season-ending interception was, hopefully we can provide enough context for the loyal FTB community to chew on until week 1 of next year.

As always, it’s impossible to point the finger at 1 individual flub on these kinds of plays — so we’ll give you all the context needed to draw your own conclusions.

First off, the concept – Inverted Smash H-Cross.

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At this level of football, where the talent is so evenly matched and the margins are so, so slim, the outcomes become less about the stellar plays and more about the mistakes.

Penn State made the biggest error on a night both teams committed their fair share, Drew Allar’s inexplicable interception with 33 seconds left that set up Notre Dame’s game-winning field goal, but the Nittany Lions made more than enough mistakes big and small before that to bring what had been a strong postseason run to a sobering end.

The Nittany Lions did a lot of good stuff in their final game of the season. They ran for 204 yards. They turned the Fighting Irish over twice and nearly came up with another on a Notre Dame fumble. They responded after the Irish had scored 17 unanswered points to take a 7-point fourth-quarter lead, then came up with a big stop in the final minute to give Allar and the offense a chance to win the game or at least send it into overtime.

But, upon closer inspection, it was a performance built more on sand than stone.

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Sometimes, the universe corrects itself.

For all the annual handwringing (most of it coming from the western part of the state) about whether Penn State and Pitt should play every season, the natural rival that the Nittany Lions have needed all this time has always been Notre Dame.

Two perennially strong programs from excellent schools, with rabid fan and alumni bases and distinctive, lucrative national brands. When they battled in the 80s and early 90s as independents, it was the marquee game on both teams’ schedules. When Penn State joined the Big Ten in 1993, it was somewhat understandable the Irish would rotate off the schedule … although, Notre Dame, positioned smack dab in the middle of Big Ten country, was already playing teams from that conference each season anyway.

But aside from a fan-servicey, mostly forgettable home-and-home split in the mid-2000s, this series has long been dormant. It took the expanded college playoff to renew it again. And if anyone—Pat Kraft, Pete Bevacqua, James Franklin, Marcus Freeman, hell, Tony Petitti—has any sense, this won’t be the only matchup between these teams we see for another decade plus.

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