At the sound of the opening whistle at Franklin Field on Saturday, Cornell's attack line took off running.
The Penn field hockey team would spend the next 70 minutes trying to catch up.
But the Big Red managed to stay one step in front of Penn for two full halves, handing the Red and Blue a 3-1 loss.
Cornell (4-1, 2-0 Ivy) commanded an early lead when freshman Brenna Gulotta recorded her first goal of the game just over five minutes into the contest. The Quakers (3-3, 0-2) quickly realized that Gulotta and her teammates were fast -- too fast, in fact, for them to shut out.
"It was a game of speed and it took us a little too long to adjust to that," Penn junior defender Melina Tsui said.
But the Quakers bounced back less than four minutes later when senior Cara Calahan pushed one past Cornell goalie Lizzie Goldblatt, putting Penn on the board for the first time and leveling the score at one.
Penn couldn't keep up for long, though. Gulotta broke through the Quakers' defense once again with just over five minutes left in the first half. Using its speed, the Cornell offensive line capitalized on all of the Penn defense's errors.
By the end of the first half, the Quakers had committed two errors they could not afford. They found themselves in the challenging position of a 2-1 deficit.
"The first goal was a terrible defensive mistake and the second one was a defensive mistake," Penn coach Val Cloud said. "Their speed beat us today. We didn't control the speed. That's basically it. We gave them opportunities."
Cornell finished off the Quakers when Katlyn Donoghue found the back of the cage midway through the second half to increase the Big Red's lead to 3-1. Continuing its aggressive campaign, Cornell successfully silenced Penn for the rest of the game.
Despite their best efforts, the Quakers could not contain the Big Red's speed, and were specifically challenged on defense.
"I think what happened to us on defense was that we got caught up too high," Tsui said.
"We needed to play a little more conservatively because they had some fast people on their team and it took us some time to adjust to that. That is where we had a little bit of trouble."
Cloud conceded that the two teams displayed very different styles on the field, and that the Big Red was just too much for the Quakers to handle.
"We just didn't step up defensively," Cloud said. "Their speed and their aggression beat us today ... I knew they would be extremely aggressive. And we couldn't match up to it. Our style is definitely not aggressive but we are going to be working on some more double-teams."
With two losses in the Ivy League, Penn now faces a challenging uphill climb in the race for the conference title.
"They just outplayed us today," Cloud said. "I'm not saying they are better than we are. They outplayed us. And it just can't happen in an Ivy game, it just can't happen. We are in a hole now. The chances of us coming out of this are miraculous. We'd have to depend on other people to lose."
The Quakers will look to regain their confidence with a win this Wednesday when they visit Maryland.
The Terrapins are 9-0 and are ranked second in the country. They are coming off a 1-0 win yesterday against Harvard, which beat Penn last weekend.
Cornell 2 1 -- 3PENN 1 0 -- 1
Scoring: 1st Half: 1, Cornell, Gulotta 2 (Corcoran) 5:20; 2, PENN, Calahan 2, 9:00; 3, Cornell, Gulotta 3 (DePaola) 29:35.
2nd Half: 4, Cornell, Donoghue 2, 58:28.
