It was only a few years ago, while Corrine Brennan was watching college basketball on the tube at home in Point Pleasant, N.J., that she said to to her daughter, "Wouldn't it be fun to grow up and do that?"

"What, mom?" said the kid.

"Flap," said Corrine.

And so it was that Sarah Brennan, 21, a senior marketing major at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia, came to be butted by the Rhode Island Ram, screeched at by the Temple Owl, virtually tackled by representatives of the Drexel Dragon and, finally, own up to the dirty little charade the school has been foisting upon us all this magical year in Philly Nation: that the Hawk not only will never die but -- at least for the remainder of the NCAA tournament -- will never be a guy.

"The toughest thing is the feathers," Brennan revealed exclusively to this reporter on Thursday in San Diego. "They're hot and sweaty because they're real. I scatter 'em everywhere. Oh yeah, and the costume smells pretty bad. It's ten years old. That's a decade of -- yuk -- boy sweat."

Actually, the Hawk itself has been 45 years of plain, sweaty boy -- 25 male Hawks in all, before comely Sarah broke the mold. "We're trendsetters. I was the first International Hawk. She's the first woman Hawk," says Tony Duldulao, the Hawk in '91 before returning home to American Samoa and then winding up as a San Diego marketer working for -- we might have guessed it -- Chicken of the Sea.

Even if you're an eminently see-able chick, you don't just show up to become the Hawk. The position carries an endowed $16,000 scholarship, and Brennan had to beat out a gaggle of guys for the honor of running figure-eights at timeouts, flapping her wings the full 40 and fending off what another collegiate treasure, Stanford's own Tree himself, defines as "mascot assaults."

This is a fair description of the infamous Hawk-Ram confrontation of a few years ago, when the Ram tried to slip an innertube over the Hawk's beak and shoulders in order to pin its wings. The Hawk's entire head flew off, but it kept its honor. In other words, it kept flapping.

On an another even more terrifying occasion a while back, the Hawk and Owl engaged in a classic throwdown that started because -- as St. Joes' Coach Phil Martelli says -- "the Hawk don't do schtick." When the Owl opened fire on his bitter rival, spraying it with a huge soaker gun, the Hawk absolutely went off and pummeled the offending hooter. As security hauled both into custody, the relentless Hawk never stopped flapping.

"I've only hit the floor twice," says Brennan, who is serving a one-year term. "The Drexel cheerleaders blindsided me until I was able to slide away, and the Ram nailed me when I was off balance. But the fans at Penn were the rudest. They had a sign that said: 'The Hawk Has No Balls.' "

Agree, Tree?

"Nawwww. The Hawk is so cool," said Stanford's veteran leaf-dweller (a.k.a., Evan Meaghy, a Ph.D. in economics at The Farm) prior to the mascots' huge meeting in the West sub-regional on Saturday. "And can you believe how tough she must be in a fight? Imagine having to punch with one arm and flap with the other!"

Curry Kirkpatrick is a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine. E-mail him at curry.kirkpatrick@espnmag.com.