Draw with Brown may end league title dreams

Penn men's soccer goalkeeper Dan Cepero fittingly marked his senior night with a clean sheet during the Quakers' crucial tilt against Brown.

Unfortunately for Penn, so did Cepero's counterpart.

The result - a 0-0 double-overtime draw on Saturday night against the Ivy League's defending co-champions - probably belied the flow of the game. And in light of Harvard's 3-1 win over Dartmouth yesterday, Penn may remember this weekend as the one in which it saw the Ivy title slip away.

"I feel like the whole team's a little disappointed right now," sophomore forward Mike Klein admitted.

The Quakers turned in one of their best performances of the season, only to be denied on several occasions by Brown's defense and its goalkeeper, Jarrett Leech.

"Even as well as they defended, we created some really good chances," coach Rudy Fuller said. "We kept pressing the issue the entire game."

The best of those chances came in the 70th minute, when senior forward Ryan Tracy took a pass from Alex Grendi into the penalty area. As Leech closed in on the senior, he slammed his close-range effort off the near post.

Klein's rebound effort looked destined for the bottom corner but whistled past on the wrong side of the post.

That incident mirrored the whole game, as Penn found itself in tenuous control but unable to capitalize.

Even Brown, in need of a win to keep its hopes of defending the title alive, acknowledged its satisfaction with a draw. As the final moments of the game kicked down, the Bears seemed content to slow the game down and grind out a tie.

But Brown's success in keeping the game scoreless certainly didn't come from a lack of enthusiasm - from the players or from Penn.

When John Elicker cheekily slipped a ball through the legs of an unsuspecting Brown defender early on, it sent the boisterous crowd of 443 into a frenzy that buoyed the home side through 110 minutes of intense soccer.

Cepero suggested that the team felt the effects of playing those 20 extra minutes, but Fuller said it had little bearing on the final result.

"I didn't feel like the guys got tired at the end, [to the extent that] it affected chances being created," he said.

The reality, though, was that Penn didn't create enough of those chances to get lucky. Tracy and Klein - the team's two leading scorers - each left the field without a shot on goal.

Nonetheless, Penn put forth a commendable performance that overshadowed its struggles in the final third.

"I can't complain with the guys' effort," Fuller admitted.

Nowhere was that more apparent than along the back line. The defense made few of the miscues that characterized Penn's recent losses to Dartmouth and American.

Cepero, in particular, saved Penn from a potential disaster in the first minute. Faced with a breakaway down the right side, he expertly got a piece of Darren Howerton's shot before a Penn defender cleared the ball off the goal line.

But while the captain acknowledged his solid performance, he addressed it knowing that three points could have made his last home regular season game much sweeter.

"It's always nice to get a clean sheet," he said. "But it would be a little icing on the cake to get the 'W,' as well."

Today, as Penn sits two points behind Harvard with only one match to play, the specter of that missing win looks imposing in contrast to the Quakers' Ivy League title hopes.

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