Four losses are too many. The first three, on the football field, were bearable. But losing Lee Evans for the season and potentially the rest of his college career is a tremendous low point for the football fans on campus.

Up to this point, even the sour taste of three losing weeks could be washed down with the reassurance that, arguably, the most exciting football player in the country would eventually squeeze a pair of shoulder pads underneath his Badgers jersey and execute the sort of electrification that made 2001 palatable.

Now, Evans will have a chance to rest his knee and hopefully test his flavor at workouts in preparation for the National Football League. If he can match his performance of last winter, when he was rated the top returning junior, he says he will likely leave the University of Wisconsin a semester short of graduation.

And who can blame him? Evans nearly had his future ripped away from him when he tore an anterior cruciate ligament last April, but he remained focused and full of determination to play his senior year for UW.

Yesterday, resigned to his dreaded physiological sentence (one year without football), he seemed deflated. We can only cheer for something to restore this young man to his former affability. In all hope, that something means playing football very, very well next year, whatever jersey he wears.