NEW HAVEN, Conn. - Junior Keith Vereb played an hour and a half of soccer on Saturday, but he really only needed three minutes.
They came at the opening of Penn's must-win match at Yale, when the Quakers came out firing and earned a free kick from upwards of 30 yards out.
That was the only opportunity Vereb, and the Quakers, needed, as the junior tallied his second goal of the season to send Penn home with a 1-0 victory.
Vereb fired a long, arching ball into the box. Yale goalie Erik Geiger took an odd route to the ball - he may have lost it in the lights or been shoved by another player - and that proved to be the difference after the ball took a deflection and trickled in amongst a mass of blue and white uniforms.
After some confusion among the officials and boos from the home crowd, the goal stood. Eighty-seven minutes later, so did Penn's place atop the Ivy League standings.
Vereb scored what would be the game-winning goal for the second time in a row, and goalkeeper Dan Cepero made six stops to preserve the win even as the Quakers were out-shot by a 2 to 1 ratio.
With the victory, the Quakers (8-4-1, 4-1-0 Ivy) sit knotted with Harvard at 12 points after the Crimson beat fifth-place Princeton on the road. But neither team can worry only about the other, since Brown and Dartmouth are still threatening with 10 points apiece (both won on Saturday).
"Anytime you get a road win in the league, it's a big result," said Penn coach Rudy Fuller, who last year saw his Quakers battle at home to a rain-soaked 1-1 tie with an Elis squad that would go on to win a share of the Ancient Eight title.
And Fuller could have easily seen a repeat this time, when, after an initial flurry of transition play, Yale (5-9-1, 1-4-0) settled down and went to work on Penn's defense.
The fast pace "kind of favors us," Cepero said of the game's initially frantic speed. "We'd like to keep it at that intensity level. If we can keep the ball and play fast, that's to our advantage."
But as Fuller said, "There's just no way a game can go that fast for 90 minutes."
It didn't. But - being an Ivy contest - this match still featured more than its share of physical play (Yale received a pair of yellow cards, and Penn midfielder Kevin Unger was issued one as well).
The big story for the Quakers, though, was not the rough-and-tumble battles at midfield but an on-the-ball defense that the Elis proved unable to shake. The back line for Penn - thin without senior Andy Howard, who tweaked his right quad last week, and sophomore Josh Baugh who broke his leg - contested the Elis from inside 20 yards well enough to give Cepero all the help he needed. The senior captain notched his fifth shutout this year.
"The back four were tremendous tonight," Cepero said. They were "just winning everything, making it a point to just dominate their forwards."
Not that the Quakers didn't have their chances, too. Yale midfielder Jacob Miller barely made a sliding stop in front of the net after Penn scoring leader Ryan Tracy drew Geiger out and then dumped the ball off to a teammate. Penn also earned a two-on-one breakaway with just over 19 minutes left in the game, but it was called off-sides.
"Our games with Penn are always end-to-end affairs," Elis coach Brian Tompkins said. "We created our share of chances today, and we could have made them. . It comes down to one key moment, and unfortunately for us, that moment fell to Penn this time."
The 987 fans who braved the cold, breezy New Haven weather did get one more chance to cheer when a fast break late in the second half had Cepero backtracking. A group of bodies crashed the box, and after missing one chance, deflected the ball to a streaking Jordan Reiger. But the Elis midfielder could not collect himself and skied his shot over the open goal. The Yale contingent fell silent.
