The football team at my alma mater, Northwestern, is having a pretty good season. Once, that would have thrilled me. Now, it just makes me uneasy.

The first game I attended at N.U. was a doozy: The Wildcats beat Northern Illinois on Sept. 25, 1982, to break what remains the longest losing streak (34 games) in Division I-A history. My classmates streamed onto the field at Dyche Stadium to dismantle the goal posts in triumph and deposit them in Lake Michigan. The team went on to a losing season, though: It had been a long time since the days when the future Notre Dame legend Ara Parseghian was its relatively successful coach, and even longer since Northwestern had gone to the Rose Bowl.

We would have been delighted if the team had won more games (it didn’t have a winning season until 1995), but we consoled ourselves by taking a sort of perverse pride in our losses. As the Wildcats were being pounded by Big Ten opponents — especially our downstate rival, the University of Illinois — the N.U. students in the stands would chant, “That’s all right, that’s O.K., you’re going to work for us one day!” Obnoxious and classist, yes, but satisfying.

When I worked for the sports section of the campus newspaper, we’d dutifully write features about the hopes and dreams of the football players at the beginning of the season. Then, as the season rolled on, we would just as dutifully record their losses next to accounts of the exploits of the university’s real star athletes: the field hockey team.