SAN ANTONIO — The quasi-underground city known in Texas as “The Riverwalk” got a new name this week, “Bowlder.” Colorado fans flooded to San Antonio to celebrate the ending of their nine-year postseason drought. The fight song echoed across the river and under the bridges. Fans embraced total strangers as long as they donned Black & Gold. It was a celebration fit for a special season.

“We made it,” they told one another, toasting to the Buffaloes. “We’re back.”

There was just one problem, the team felt the same way. That perfect celebration lacked its perfect ending.

“The game sucked,” Sefo Liufau said after the game, perfectly summing up the feelings of the thousands.

The Buffaloes, like their loyal fans, were happy to be there. They swam with the dolphins, they zipped on the rollercoasters, they stampeded that riverwalk until its cobblestone cracked. They soaked up every last second of the reward for their special season.

Can you blame them?

In the end, though, they simply weren’t ready to play a football game, and afterward their head coach had more excuses than answers.

“We were hurt,” he said when asked what happened to his stellar defensive backfield.

“I saw a bummed up quarterback,” he responded when pressed about the lack of offensive production.

The coach, just as he did after the last disappointing loss, only wanted to talk about the past.

“The most improved team in the history of the Pac-12,” he said. “Top 25 for the first time in 11 years… Finished the regular season in the top 10, I don’t know how long that’s been… First bowl in 10 years.”

“In the locker room after the game,” he added later. “It was a really neat, neat time.”

Mark it down as the first time in history a coach described his locker room as “neat” after a 30-point beatdown.

Guess what? It is neat. It’s neat that a team did something so special that not even a combined 61 points between them and their last two opponents could take it away.

The fact of it is, they couldn’t act like they had been there before because they never had. “The Rise,” in an odd turn of things, was too real.

“We don’t know what this is like,” safety Ryan Moeller said after the game. “This was our first trip to a bowl and a big bowl at that.”

“I think we kind of weren’t really sure of what to expect,” senior Alex Kelley added in. “We’re a really good team, and we have faced really good teams this year, but the kind of caliber that OSU and Washington bring is on a whole new level.”

Colorado played themselves into a tier of college football where they didn’t exactly belong; they had 12-win heart with six-win talent. They weren’t meant to play for a Pac-12 Championship in 2016; they weren’t ready for an Alamo Bowl. The Buffaloes climbed over the first and most important hump and came down the other side too fast. The next hump hit them like a bag of bricks.

They weren’t yet ready for the next climb, it’s naive to think they should or could have been. It took them three years to get to this point, it could easily take just that long to ascend the next peak. It’s the challenge ahead for the head coach of the Buffaloes and his 2016 squad laid a fantastic foundation for that next step.

The goal will be to bring in the talent to match the heart, to know how to act like they’ve been there before, to make success part of a constant culture, to never again be satisfied in a losing locker room. The next rise starts now.

“We didn’t come out with a win, but we see what it takes,” Moeller said. “Those of us that are coming back are going to let this sit in our minds and our hearts. We have to take it to that next step. Otherwise, we’re at the same result, and we don’t want that.”

The 2016 Buffaloes wanted to make CU great again; they made CU good again, and that’s okay. Greatness awaits just on the other side of that next hump.