The 17,737 who braved the cold wind at the Yale Bowl on Parents Weekend saw two football teams heading in very different directions this season.
For Penn, Saturday's workmanlike 17-7 victory over the home team was another step toward another title-deciding clash with Harvard on Nov. 13. For the Elis, it was a day of dashed hopes for their first Ivy League championship since 1999.
Much has been made of the Penn football team's 18-game Ivy League winning streak, the longest ever in conference history. But the truth is that while this is an impressive number, it is the only way Penn has been able to win two consecutive Ancient Eight titles.
To win a championship in any sport requires not only good players but an understanding of the system in which a season takes place. It is this second part which has so often brought supposedly mighty teams down before reaching the summit -- just ask the Philadelphia Eagles and England's national soccer team.
In the Ivy League, the system dictates that you almost have to go undefeated to win the championship in football. If you are lucky, you can get away with one loss at most. A second loss kills the season, and that's what Yale ended up with on Saturday.
It wasn't supposed to be this way for the Elis. With two legitimate offensive superstars in quarterback Alvin Cowan and running back Robert Carr, Yale seemed primed to pull off a surprise or two this season. But the surprise got pulled on them in the opening week of league play, when Cornell beat the Elis, 19-7, in Ithaca, N.Y.
That left no room for error for the rest of the season. But Saturday brought many errors, from bad formations to a game-changing fumble just yards from Penn's end zone.
"We had half a dozen flat out mistakes that I don't know if I've seen us do ever," Yale coach Jack Siedlecki said after the game.
Cowan and Carr could console themselves with having set school records in passing and rushing yards, but that paled in comparison to having lost their last shot at the bigger prize.
"That's just the way it is -- life isn't fair all the time," Siedlecki said. "But we did have big expectations, and we didn't live up to them. That's just the way it is, it's going to happen."
The way it is for Penn is quite nice at the moment. The last few games haven't been pretty, but since their loss to Villanova in the home opener, the Quakers have come out on top in every game.
This game was probably Penn's second-biggest challenge in the league this season, behind Harvard. Penn coach Al Bagnoli did a very good job of adapting to the many offensive tricks Yale threw at Penn, and adjusting his offense to the schemes run by Elis' defensive coordinator Rick Flanders -- Bagnoli's former secondary coach.
"I told our kids ever since Sunday that these guys are going to step up and challenge you, and you're going to have to step up and you're going to have to meet that challenge," he said. "If you want to come in here, and beat a good team in a desperate situation, this is what you're going to have to do. And luckily for us, the kids did it."
There certainly was a bit of luck involved for both teams, although it was mostly bad. Each team had one big turnover in the other team's red zone, and there would have been at least 14 more points on the scoreboard had they not happened. New Penn kicker Peter Stine's 26-yard missed field goal may or may not have actually been good, depending on who you ask.
But on one thing, the opinion is unanimous -- Yale's season has failed to live up to expectations, and Penn has cleared a major hurdle on the way to another Ivy League championship.
Jonathan Tannenwald is a junior urban studies major from Washington. His e-mail address is jtannenw@sas.upenn.edu.
