The next eight months are going to be filled with the same debate:

Was Pitt’s 2018 season a success or a disappointment?

There are a lot of angles to that question, a lot of ways to slice that onion, so to speak, but the question is the same. Does an ACC Coastal Division championship cancel out a truly unique 7-7 record? Or does the .500 mark through 14 games outweigh the significance of accomplishing something for the first time in school history?

In the aftermath of Pitt’s final loss in 2018, a 14-13 defeat at the hands of Stanford in Monday’s Sun Bowl, head coach Pat Narduzzi didn’t think the close to the season, which also included losses to Miami and Clemson, cast too long of a shadow over the season’s accomplishments.

“I don’t think so. I really don’t. Our goal is to get to a championship and win an ACC championship. We got there and we had a chance. We didn’t play great. That was our first time there. I think we rebounded and played a lot better in a bowl game against a quality opponent.”

Pitt did play better against Stanford on the final day of December than it had against Clemson in the ACC Championship Game at the beginning of the month. The Panthers lost to the Tigers 42-10; against the Cardinal, the score was only 14-13, and Pitt was actually in control for most of the afternoon in El Paso.

So there was improvement from game No. 13 to game No. 14. But the end results were the same - a loss - as they had been five times during the regular season, from blowout defeats at the hands of Penn State and Central Florida to befuddling losses against North Carolina and Miami and a what-could-have-been fall at Notre Dame.

But amidst those defeats, the Panthers did some good things. Powered by a running game that produced historic results (the first pair of 1,000-yard rushers in a single season in Pitt history), the team outplayed the rest of its division, posting a 6-2 record and getting to Charlotte for the conference title game without needing the help of a tiebreaker.

Pitt earned its spot in the ACC Championship Game, and to Narduzzi, it’s important not to forget that fact.

“We got there. There’s a lot of people that would like to be there,” Narduzzi said on Monday. “We rolled through the Coastal Division and that’s - you can walk away from that season saying we were Coastal Division champions. That c-word is still on this football team and this 2018 senior class.”

It’s true: the shirts and hats proclaiming Pitt the champions of the Coastal Division in 2018 can’t be unprinted. But the other part is true, too: for all of their successes, the Panthers also had some considerable disappointments along the way in 2018.

“I’d say there were a lot of missed opportunities,” sophomore quarterback Kenny Pickett said Monday. “It’s a success, like Coach said: we’re champions, Coastal champs, no one can take that away from us. But there were also a lot of opportunities that we had that we should have taken advantage of and we didn’t.”