With 4:14 to play in the first half, Drexel forward Sean Brooks converted a three-point play to put the Dragons ahead, 25-20.
Then the fun began.
Penn scored the last 13 points of the first half to enter the locker room with a 33-25 advantage.
After Drexel guard Bashir Mason opened the second half by making one of two free throws, the Quakers ran off 11 straight to establish a commanding lead.
Eventually the Penn run would balloon to 39-6, but it was the stretch at the end of the first half that swung the game in the Quakers' favor.
"We had a chance to pack it in," said Penn coach Fran Dunphy, who saw his team fall behind 17-9 early in the game.
But packing it in was not on the Quakers' agenda.
After a pair of Tim Begley free throws got Penn within three at 25-22, sophomore Mark Zoller knocked down his second three-pointer of the game to tie the score.
Then things went downhill fast for the quickly unraveling Dragons.
Brooks' missed layup on the following possession led to sophomore Steve Danley's layup in transition, which gave Penn its first lead since a 5-3 advantage.
Brooks' turnover on the Dragons' next possession eventually turned into a Zoller layup and a full-blown momentum swing.
Drexel coach Bruiser Flint was quick to point out that the run was a product of his own team's failures.
"We played dumb for the last four minutes of the first half," Flint said. "They got two easy layups because we made bad plays and we turned the ball over."
Flint noticed a shift in his team's offensive attitude from the first 16 minutes to the rest of the game.
While Drexel built the 25-20 lead, "We moved the ball around and got shots when we wanted to," Flint said.
"Then all of a sudden, guys wanted to take guys one-on-one and make passes in transition, and they got the momentum."
The Quakers were just as dominant to begin the second half, and they were led by their senior captain.
With 18:12 remaining and the Quakers ahead, 38-26, Begley began a minute-long offensive explosion.
On three consecutive possessions, Begley connected on buckets from behind the arc in the span of 65 seconds, including one from well behind the stripe at the top of the key.
After the game, Dunphy joked about his role in this one-man offensive flurry.
"I would like to tell you that we had this set up and we were going to push it down and Begs was going to trail our break and he was going to knock down threes," Dunphy said.
But this was just Begley being Begley.
"Fact is, that he's a very good basketball player, felt the opportunity and took advantage of it," Dunphy added.
While 24 points is a lot to score in an eight-minute span, the one point allowed by the Quakers in that same time span catches the eye first.
"I would like to think it was all keyed by our defense," Dunphy said.
Another factor that certainly helped was Drexel's inability to convert its free-throw attempts. In addition to going a miserable 14-for-29 for the night, the Dragons shot just 1-for-9 during Penn's 39-6 run.
That run gave the Quakers a 59-31 lead, and unlike in the Quinnipiac game, Penn was able to hold the large lead and even stretch it into a 31-point final margin.
