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Were this ballet, the dancers would have been 430-pound guys defaming the Bolshoi. Opera? La Boheme performed by Marilyn Manson.

In the end, Wake Forest's 12-3 win at Florida State didn't have to be art or anything resembling it. And that was probably more surprising than anything else -- including the fact that Wake has now beaten the once-indomitable Seminoles three years in a row.

At 7:04 p.m. Saturday, there was no greater certainty than this: Wake Forest would have to play at the top of its game to have a chance. If informed his team would lose one touchdown to a penalty and another to a goal-line fumble, coach Jim Grobe might have turned to his state trooper escort and asked to head back to the airport right then and there.

Admit it. Every time they started a second-half drive, you assumed one of them would do something Nole-ish. An end-around run for 75 yards. Perhaps a Nicholson moment. Just like psycho Jack with the pickaxe through the door, linebacker Derek would surely burst into the backfield and cause mayhem. Cosmically speaking, shouldn't the Deacs have to pay for treating their scoring chances like scratch-off lottery tickets?

Vince Lombardi would say so. Lee Corso apparently thought so. Corso, a former Seminoles player and current ESPN analyst, offered this nugget Saturday morning: "Florida State beats them by at least two touchdowns."

At that moment, the Deacons were just walking back into the lobby of their hotel from a team breakfast, and they heard it all. They also knew Florida State quarterback Christian Ponder had declared, "We're not going to lose this game," five days earlier. Ponder's specific verbiage became especially interesting in retrospect. He didn't say, "We're going to win this game." He said, "We're not going to lose this game."

The Seminoles lost it, all right. They lost seven turnovers and the game. And Wake will take it. The Deacs are 3-0 with defensively challenged Navy coming to town Saturday (3:45, ESPNU), and they haven't played particularly well yet. (They do lead the nation in turnover margin, a statistic that's just as reliable in predicting victory as total offense.)

Who would throw that back? Not these guys, whose season may get especially intriguing. Wake moved up two spots to 16th in the Associated Press poll Sunday, and further upward mobility is possible this week. No. 15 BYU is off; 13th-ranked South Florida has to play at suddenly resurgent N.C. State; and Penn State, ranked 12th, plays host to No. 22 Illinois.

The Deacs haven't been ranked higher than 14th in football since 1947.

They've won six games in a row dating to last season. They have never won more than seven straight.

Only BYU (14), Georgia (11), TCU (seven) and Southern California (seven) have longer active streaks than Wake's run, and two of them may fall soon. The Bulldogs face Alabama and TCU plays at Oklahoma this week.

Wake Forest has gone 11-3 on the road since the start of the 2006 season. The program collected 13 road victories in all of the 1960s and 14 in the '70s.

On Thursday, Oct. 9, Clemson pays a visit to Wake on ESPN in what might be the biggest home game in the program's history. Maybe Corso will have formed a different opinion by then.

Contact Rob Daniels at 373-7028 or rob.daniels@news-record.com