Having been dominated by eventual national champion Trinity on Friday and edged by Dartmouth on Saturday, the Penn men's squash team did not want to go home from the College Squash Association National Championships without a win.
Leading 4-2 against Cornell with three matches to play Sunday, Penn needed one win out of three remaining matches to gain that elusive victory.
The win came from the unlikeliest of places.
Down 2-0 in his match in the seventh spot on the ladder, junior Eric Bardawil rallied to secure Penn's lone team victory on the weekend.
That victory gave Penn -- which entered the tournament as the eighth seed -- the nation's seventh overall ranking
Bardawil had lost his first two games, 9-6 and 9-3. Even at that point, Bardawil thought he had his opponent, Cornell's Geoff Fong, beaten.
"It was a matter of time," Bardawil said. "I was pretty fit and I knew the guy I was playing wasn't as fit."
After beating a tiring Fong, 9-7 and 9-1, and making it seem that he was on his way to victory, Bardawil confronted another obstacle, as Fong took a 6-1 lead in the decisive fifth game.
Bardawil responded, winning the next eight points to win the game, 9-6, and the match, 5-4.
"That was a heroic effort," Penn coach Craig Thorpe-Clark said of Bardawil's five-game victory.
Of course, the 5-4 score would have swung in the Big Red's favor had it not been for four other winning performances, including one by junior Rich Repetto, who also turned in a dramatic five-game victory.
Repetto, second in Penn's ladder, fell behind Cornell's Will Cheng two games to none. He followed the two losses with a pair of 9-0 wins, and then defeated Cheng, 9-7, in the fifth game to win the match.
Sophomore Jacob Himmelrich and junior Drew Crockett won their respective matches against Cornell without losing a game, while freshman Graham Bassett posted a 3-1 victory.
The weekend did not begin as well for the Quakers, who finished the season with a 9-9 overall record.
Penn failed to win a game in a 9-0 loss at the hands of No. 1 Trinity, a team which beat Harvard, 5-4, on Sunday to earn its sixth straight national championship and its 108th consecutive win.
In the first consolation game, the Quakers fell to Dartmouth, 6-3, in a competitive match that included a pair of 3-2 Big Green victories. Penn's winners were Crockett, Repetto and freshman Ben Ende.
While the season has come to a close for most of Penn's players, Repetto, Ende and freshman Gilly Lane will travel to the CSA Individuals in Canton, N.Y., this weekend.
Lane, who in addition to sitting atop Penn's lineup is the nation's 12th-ranked player, saw some good things in a 1-2 weekend.
"I think we took a good step toward next year," Lane said of his team, which had no seniors out of its top nine players this year. "We really came together at the end of the season."
