To the victors.

A grueling Ivy League season ended rather quietly for the Penn football team. No goal posts came down, and only a handful of fans watched as the Ivy League trophy was presented to the Quakers captains in the northwest corner of Cornell's Schoellkopf Field Saturday. But the jubilation was evident as the players celebrated their 45-15 win over Cornell and their second Ivy League championship in three years with hugs and victory cigars. "It's absolutely unbelievable," said Penn senior kicker Jason Feinberg, who, with a field goal and six extra points, became Penn's all-time leading scorer. "You work 365 days a year for one thing -- to win an Ivy League championship. It really makes all the work seem worth it." The Ivy League season was less a race than it was a war of attrition. At one point, there were five teams tied at the top of the standings. One by one, Princeton, Yale and Harvard dropped out, leaving Cornell (5-5, 5-2 Ivy League) and Penn (7-3, 6-1) to play for the championship on the season's final weekend. It was the first time since 1993 that two teams had gone head to head to determine the outright champs. "It's been a long year, and at the end it was really hard to get motivated for practice," junior quarterback Gavin Hoffman said. "But in the search for a title it just seemed like the season was going by so quickly, and we had something to prepare for every week. I'm sitting on cloud nine right now." Hoffman was instrumental in the Red and Blue's march to the title. He's been shattering Penn passing records since he transferred here from Northwestern before the 1999 season. With 330 yards Saturday, Hoffman became the first Penn quarterback to throw for 3,000 yards in a season. His 3,214 yards left him just 39 yards shy of the league record for passing in a season. Hoffman finished third in the nation in passing efficiency and tossed 24 touchdowns. "This year, we had the best quarterback, the best running back and the best offensive coordinator in the country," Feinberg said. "I wouldn't trade any one of those guys for anyone else in [Division] I-AA." That offensive coordinator is Andy Coen, who was hired away from the same position at Lehigh before the season started. Coen kept the Penn offense humming all season, even though the Quakers were without Kris Ryan, 1999's leading Ivy League rusher. Ryan was hampered by a pair of injuries that kept him out of four games this season and rendered him virtually ineffective for a few others. Ryan showed up for the stretch run, though, as he put together three solid performances in the season's last three games. To top it off, Ryan helped the Quakers lock up the championship with one of the best games of his career, running for 243 yards and four touchdowns in Ithaca, N.Y. The fact that Penn handed the ball to Ryan so many times at Cornell was significant in that it was one of only a few games this season in which the Quakers have not had to make a fourth-quarter comeback, which usually entailed passing on every down. After the Quakers lost a close game to Yale, they stood at 2-1 in the league and were tied with four other schools. "There was a lot of parity in the league," Hoffman said. "I don't think there was too much separating the top teams, at least one through five." In their next three games -- against Brown, Princeton and Harvard -- the Quakers would trail before coming back to win. The Brown game was perhaps the most exciting contest that Franklin Field has seen in several years. The Quakers trailed Brown in the fourth quarter, 38-20, but they scored three touchdowns in a span of just over four minutes to take a nail-biting 41-38 victory. Two weeks later, on Homecoming Weekend against Harvard, the Quakers were trailing by five with a little over a minute left. After they scored, the offense watched from the sidelines as Harvard kicker Robbie Wright's potentially decisive 33-yard field goal attempt fell well short of the crossbars. "It was definitely an emotionally draining year, because we always had those comebacks," Hoffman said. "It didn't seem like any of these big games were ever decided until the end."