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The scene was familiar.

One week removed from a close loss on the road against a top-ranked team in a rivalry game that could have been a signature win, Pitt came home to a modest crowd at Heinz Field and put in a tough, resilient performance for one of the most emotional wins of the season.

On Saturday, the emotional win was a 35-34 upset of No. 15 UCF in a game that saw the Panthers stake out a 21-0 lead, fall behind 31-21 an then win with a trick play on fourth down from the 3 and less than a minute on the clock.

That win followed the Panthers’ difficult loss at Penn State a week ago, when they were good enough to threaten the Nittany Lions but not quite good enough to knock them off.

The comparison point is last October. After a 3-3 start to the season, Pitt went to South Bend to take on Notre Dame. The Panthers always play the Irish tight, and the 2018 meeting was no different. Notre Dame emerged victorious with a 19-14 final score, preventing Pitt from getting a win that really could have made a statement.

But the Panthers weren’t discouraged by their near-miss. Instead, they came back to Heinz Field and hosted Duke in the first of five ACC games to close the regular season. The Panthers and Blue Devils went back and forth throughout the game. Pitt trailed at halftime and at the start of the fourth quarter, but with five seconds left, Kenny Pickett threw to Maurice Ffrench in the end zone for the win.

It was an emotional end to a tense game, and it answered the question of how Pitt would respond to the close loss at Notre Dame.

Most importantly, it boosted Pitt into the rest of its ACC schedule. The Panthers went to Virginia on a short week the following Friday and knocked off the Cavaliers, who were ranked No. 22 at the time. Then they trounced Virginia Tech by 30 to set the state for a trip to Wake Forest in a clinch-the-Coastal opportunity.

Pitt took care of business, of course, beating the Deacons to earn a division championship, and the jumping-off point was the Duke game - the emotional win at home following a tough loss on the road to a rival.

Which sounds a little familiar.

So now the question is, can the Panthers follow a similar pattern and go on a run?

“I hope so,” redshirt junior center Jimmy Morrissey said after Saturday’s win over UCF. “I hope we go on a tear right now. This team’s really good. I think we are hitting our stride right now. Offense needs to finish better; we still left a lot of points out there. It could have been a lot better performance from us, but we got the job done. We were able to score some points. Enough to win.”

Pitt’s 35 points against UCF were a season high and the most the Panthers have scored since they put up 52 against Virginia Tech last November. But just like the scheduled lightened a bit after the Notre Dame game last season, so too does this year’s schedule set up favorably for Pitt.

After opening with Coastal favorite Virginia and then facing ranked opponents in back-to-back weeks with Penn State and UCF, the rest of Pitt’s schedule doesn’t have a single team that is ranked (Duke received four votes in the coaches poll last week; that’s the closest any upcoming opponent is to being ranked).

The Panthers open the final eight games with a home nonconference match against Delaware, then they go to Duke and Syracuse, host Miami, go to Georgia Tech, host North Carolina, go to Virginia Tech and host Boston College.

Aside from the annual dread of UNC, there are no unbeatable teams in that stretch of eight games. They are all winnable for a team that just gave two top-15 teams all they could handle in back-to-back weeks.

“We can play with anybody, you know?” senior safety Damar Hamlin said Saturday. “And if we don’t make mistakes, throughout each game throughout the year, we can be where those teams are at in the top 10, top 15. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t be. We just have to do what we have to do to win these games and not just focus on the big ones.”

Hamlin went so far as to acknowledge that coming out of the Penn State and UCF games does feel somewhat reminiscent of last year’s Notre Dame/Duke combo.

“It definitely does. It feels good.”