Rain, rain, go away.

PRINCETON, N.J. -- Don't tell them it was a meaningless scrimmage.

Penn and Princeton football players stood in tunnels on adjacent corners of Princeton Stadium on Tuesday afternoon. Still in full uniform, they were watching the torrential rain, the whipping wind and the ubiquitous streaks of lightning through the tunnel opening.

They were waiting, anxiously, for the contest -- which was stopped six minutes and 43 seconds into the second of three quarters by lighting -- to resume.

It never did. The game ended in a 7-7 tie, leaving players and coaches wanting more.

They wanted more because of personnel reasons:

"We got through our first string players, and our second string players and we were just getting into our thirds," Penn coach Al Bagnoli said. "Unfortunately, we really didn't get a chance to see them play."

But they also wanted more because it wasn't a meaningless scrimmage. This wasn't Princeton versus Rowan, or Penn versus Millersburg.

The usual scrimmage opponents for the Tigers and Quakers couldn't keep their dates this year. In fact, Rowan and Millersburg actually ended up playing each other.

So rather than enter the season completely untested in a game situation, Penn and Princeton -- rivals in almost every sport, football certainly included -- decided to scrimmage each other.

And as expected, it was not just an ordinary scrimmage.

"When you play Princeton, you always want to have the upper hand," Penn wide receiver Rob Milanese said.

It wasn't as if the two teams were worried about who scored the most.

"In a scrimmage, the score, you can throw it out the window," Milanese said.

But the hitting was a little harder, the running a little quicker. Even the coaches showed more-than-just-a-scrimmage intensity.

Upstairs in the coaches' booth, a Quakers assistant yelled at a player for taking his helmet off while on the field:

"That's a penalty," he said through his headset. "We talked about that. Don't let it happen again."

It was the same on the Princeton sidelines, where a Tigers coach could be heard yelling, "You can't read, can you? Come on. Let's go."

While it wasn't exactly last-week-of-the-Ivy-season intensity, both teams felt there was a little more at stake.

"We really had to be careful that we didn't get our guys too excited," Bagnoli said. "We didn't want to turn this into a bloodbath."

And it wasn't. There was one injury -- Penn wide receiver Erik Bolinder sprained his ankle -- but the referees made sure things didn't get too violent, and every quarterback was decked out in a hands-off red jersey.

Penn played pretty solidly on both sides of the ball. On offense, Gavin Hoffman completed six of 12 passes for 59 yards, although he did have one of his passes intercepted by Tigers defensive back Sam Snyder.

And Kris Ryan, who was hobbled by injuries last season, looked strong with his first carry of the day (an eight-yard gain) and explosive with his second carry (an 18-yard burst through the middle).

Quakers sophomore Jake Perskie, all 5'9" of him, rushed twice for 17 yards, while Penn's only touchdown was a two-yard run by sophomore Michael Kapusta.

"We ran the football pretty effectively," Bagnoli said.

The defense did allow an 85-yard touchdown bomb from Brian Danielewicz to B.J. Szymanski. But the Quakers also stuffed Princeton on nearly every run, allowing no Tigers back more than four yards on the ground. And Penn's Galan brothers, John and Ed, had back-to-back sacks late in the first quarter.

The game was preceded by an hour-long series of drills, which included a 7-on-7, no hitting scrimmage, and simulations from the goal-line and the start of the "red zone."

This was all similar to the Penn-Millersburg scrimmages of the past in structure, but not in execution.

"It was definitely a more intense atmosphere than a normal scrimmage," Hoffman said.

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