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It was so quiet you could almost hear your heart beat.
Following an improbable 35-31 loss to Eastern Washington, the top-seeded SIU football team had to walk past the celebrating Eagles and their 100 or so exuberant fans, go to their locker room and try to figure out what happened.
Every eye was straight forward or looking toward the ground and not a single one was dry. The seniors, especially, had no idea what to do.
Alexis Moreland said "this feels like hell," and was one of the most demonstratively disappointed Salukis after the game.
"Words can't describe the way I feel," said Moreland, who played the last game of his Saluki career and will be seen as one of the greatest defensive players in school history. The normally smiley senior was red-eyed and struggled to utter every word.
"All the hard work everybody put in. The sweat, the tears, the blood - to have to lose this game the way we did on our home field, there's no words to describe it."
Quarterback Joel Sambursky's last-second desperation heave was batted down at the line of scrimmage, giving SIU its second consecutive first-round playoff exit.
Head coach Jerry Kill addressed his team after the game, saying that they had won like men - now they had to lose like men. He told them to salvage the positives of the otherwise dominant season.
It wasn't supposed to be this way.
Kill was supposed to be giving a much different speech, and the players knew it. For three months they were the best, untouchable in Division I-AA and an epitome of everything a football team should be. But the perfect season was derailed by a scrambling quarterback who threw laser-guided passes all afternoon.
SIU's blitzes got to Eastern Washington quarterback Erik Meyer, who cornerback Brandon Bruner described as a "little rabbit," but could never finish the job. Meyer ended up passing for 437 yards.
"They played balls out," Bruner said. "They played a hell of a game."
As a result, there were 18 seniors who would be looking back at their last game and remembering a loss. That was what the underclassmen, most of which were just as distraught as the seniors, talked about after the game.
Arkee Whitlock, who came into the game as SIU's leading rusher, had not taken his helmet off 15 minutes after the game had ended.
Whitlock has a lot of football to go in his career, but said the moments after the loss were not about people who would play another day.
"It's not really about us underclassmen right now," Whitlock said. "It's about the guys who put in all this work over the past four years and the guys that went through the 1-10 season."
Linebacker Royal Whitaker, one of the few Salukis to get his hands on Meyer - he made it count, barreling through the Eastern Washington quarterback like a battering ram - was choked up and visibly depressed after the game.
He said it wasn't that they couldn't get to the quarterback, lost at home or would no longer be No. 1. It was the people they would no longer see - people who became family members during SIU's rise to the top.
"We're not upset that we lost the game," Whitaker said. "We're upset because we're losing our 18 seniors that we have on the team."
Football teams are almost always closely-knit groups, but the 2004 Salukis seemed to be on a different plane of camaraderie this season. They lived the cliches of teamwork, preparation and playing as one unit.
So it was little surprise they were united to the end.
Just before everyone was cleared to leave and after Kill had gone to a press conference, someone started to sing "We Are Family," a tune sung throughout the season to bring the team together.
One by one, more voices joined the one who had started singing. When the song started it sounded desperate and sounded more like a cry than a song. But eventually, it was an almost joyous sound, and from that point the crying, for the most part, was over.
Moreland said the things he would remember about the 2004 season would be the positives like team chemistry, camaraderie and the friends he made for life.
He was not calling 2004 a failure, and neither were the underclassmen.
" I wouldn't give this team up for anything," Whitaker said. "We tried our best. You won't win them all, and things happen.
"To me, this is the best team we've had in a while and I'll always love these guys."
Saluki Sports 
