Nashville, TENN--Diego Pavia's interception in the second quarter of Saturday's loss felt...familiar.

That wasn't Pavia's fault or the fault of the play itself. It was more about an attitude and a feeling that comes simultaneously with the history of Vanderbilt's program in games like that one; the thought of 'here we go again.'

Up until that point of the 2024 season, that feeling had rarely come to the surface. Often it was substituted with magic.

As Vanderbilt sits in the midst of a three-game losing streak it feels as if that magic is gone.

Throughout that stretch, Vanderbilt still looked like an improved version of its 2023 self but was missing something. It was missing the momentum that it rode in its special wins, it was missing its responsiveness and bigger than all; it appeared that it was missing its swagger.

"There late it seemed like I didn't recognize the team that was on the field, and that's disappointing," Lea said after Vanderbilt's loss to Tennessee. "It seemed like we were on our heels a little bit, I just didn't feel that redirection of the energy on the field."

Vanderbilt has a bowl berth as a relic of the swagger that it showed throughout the early portion of its season, but as it fell to Tennessee it was hit with the reality check that it so often avoided --or pushed off--throughout the majority of the season.

The reality being that a season like this--and a transfer class like this--doesn't come around West End often. The quote-unquote 'next step' for this program will be harder to execute than it's made out to be.

Odds are that Vanderbilt's magic makers like Eli Stowers, CJ Taylor--and perhaps Diego Pavia if his lawsuit bounces the wrong way--won't be walking through the doors to the McGugin Center next summer. It could be back to square one for Vanderbilt football.

Clark Lea will have plenty of resources to work with, but he'll have to strike gold twice in a row. That's difficult, although not impossible.

What makes it easier is his improved selling point. Vanderbilt has shown proof that it can win, and win big, in this league. It's also been reminded that even though the gap has narrowed, the margins are still small.

"As the season's gone on, it just feels like we're having to a perfect game to come out on top," Lea said. "We got to make sure that we have the ability to play over the course of the season, a two deep, at some positions a three deep."

Vanderbilt doesn't just need to add depth in the transfer portal window. It also needs starpower at some of the most important positions. Whether it can find it, or at least enough of it to get by, will be a test of its program's sustainability.

Will this be a one-season wonder? Or will this offseason transform the Vanderbilt football America has gotten to know?

For now that's the question that looms over Lea's program as it goes through bowl prep for the first time in his tenure. The period that his program is in almost feels like the Sunday night before finals week, though.

You can do all you want to prepare for it, but you know it will define you and there's only so much you can do to brace for what it will entail. The fun of Vanderbilt's magical season will be over at the buzzer of its bowl game and it will have to find itself again.

"It's no different than a year ago," Lea said. "The things that we identified we needed to strengthen, we went out and did. So we're going to do that with a bowl team this year, and we'll keep advancing on the goal."

It's not the climb that Lea and his staff had to make to overcome a 2-10 season with a deteriorating culture, but it's a climb nonetheless. To stay at the top you've got to work like heck. Lea will have to do that and channel a little magic in the process as he tries to prove that Vanderbilt can sustain success in college football's modern era.