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TEMPE, Ariz. - It's all right to mourn defeat, which is as much the spirit of college football as celebrating victory. Just remember the Miami Hurricanes' loss in the Fiesta Bowl was just that. Loss. Not death.
Yes, Ohio State ended Miami's fantabulous winning streak.
Yes, it hurt.
But all South Florida and every Canes follower should be holding heads high and cheering the University of Miami instead of weeping over this inevitable termination of UM's 34-game string.
I'm not about to sour-grape out, either, on that late interference call that did so much to put Ohio State up to stay, 31-24, in boggling double-overtime.
Down deep, I don't believe penalties on violations either non-existent or, at best, marginal, should be called at such a critical time. But that was only one of hundreds of plays in the best college football game ever played.
Miami had plenty of other chances. It's your own fault if you put yourself at the mercy of one zebra on a single play.
At the end of this wild and Buckeye-wonderful night, Ohio State had outplayed Miami.
The Buckeyes deserve No. 1. The Canes deserve huzzahs that can be heard all the way to Columbus for running up such a splendiferous streak in the first place.
Better to lose to a team tough as sandhogs in a classic than to have blown one of those far lesser regular-season games against Florida State or Tennessee or even Rutgers, for heaven's sake.
It took a world of talent to get to the place UM reached in front of all the football world.
A world of heart, too.
This doesn't say OSU intrinsically possesses either more talent or more heart than UM.
Friday night, though, it did.
I don't pretend to be objective about Miami football. Generally speaking, objectivity is the biggest myth in journalism. Specifically speaking, I can't spend 46 years around a team and not hurt when it hurts.
I feel worse about that possibly grievous injury to Willis McGahee than about the defeat. Only one man, sure, but it's one man standing on the verge of fame and millions of National Football League dollars, and heaven knows how that injury will play out either short-term or long-term.
McGahee wept on Miami's sideline the last part of the game, not for himself but for his team.
Ken Dorsey wept in his mother's arms afterward, not for himself but for the teammates he probably believes he let down.
He didn't let them down. Miami's offensive line couldn't handle Ohio State's defensive line. One of Dorsey's two interceptions was simply a bad break, skidding off Andre Johnson's fingers. Dorsey's fumble, one of three by the Hurricanes, was caused by a starburst of Ohio State helmets right in his face.
And then, when Dorsey took such a lick he had to leave for one play in the second overtime, he was helmet-hammered so hard he barely knew his name.
That and much else made this look more like a championship prize fight than a football game. Mean, yet clean. It roared in like a football-style replay of those brutal Tony Zale-Rocky Graziano fights.
Too bad we are going to have to listen to so many excuses from fans about that interference call against Miami, as though it were the entire game instead of one play.
Worse that McGahee had to go down hurt so badly that his football future could be doubtful.
Yet, I dare you to find a greater football game, or a greater effort against heavy odds than the Buckeyes pitched against the Hurricanes on the field that seems to haunt Miami.
Imagine. OSU completed exactly five passes in regulation -- spookily, the same number Penn State did in upsetting Miami in the '87 Fiesta Bowl right here.
Imagine. The Canes committed five turnovers -- after committing seven in that game 16 years ago, a game that, like this, snatched the title of titles away from Miami.
''I think Ohio State deserved to win,'' said Kellen Winslow Jr., the Miami tight end who is even a better college player than his Pro Football Hall of Fame father was.
Ohio State did. And it still takes nothing from the glory of the Hurricanes' absurdly magnificent unbeaten streak of 34, or Larry Coker's historic 24-0 start as a head coach, or Ken Dorsey's 38-1 record until Friday night.
This isn't politics, or war.
It's football.
It calls for sportsmanship, for class, and perhaps the finest thing of all that came out of this game was the sportsmanship, the classiness, the absence of cheap shots and trash-talking.
Call it the greatest of all college games.
Call it sad, for it was all of that for Miami.
But don't cheapen what the Buckeyes did by calling it robbery.
It was too magnificent a game to be soiled in any such way.