All it took was one misplay.
One loose ball near the Penn goal, one touch past diving goalkeeper Cailly Carroll and one more notch in the loss column for the women's soccer team.
After Penn lost possession inside the 18-yard box in the 63rd minute against Columbia on Saturday, it was a race to the ball between Columbia forward Shannon Munoz and Carroll, who relieved starter Sara Rose in the second half. Munoz beat Carroll to it, and scored what would hold up as the winning goal in a 1-0 contest at Rhodes Field.
"It was one lucky bounce, and the kid scores a goal," Penn coach Darren Ambrose said. "Other than that, what did they do?"
What Columbia (5-4-3, 2-0-1 Ivy) did was keep Penn (6-3-1, 1-2-0) from making anything happen in the box. What they did was frustrate the Quakers time after time, despite losing the possession battle. And, most importantly, what they did was win.
"It's really disappointing to lose an Ivy game, and even more frustrating to lose to a team that we didn't think was a good soccer team tonight," said captain Natalie Capuano, who tallied one of Penn's three shots on goal.
Two weeks ago, it was the same story. Not only did the Quakers fall to a Temple team that they outshot by almost 20, but they followed it up with a loss to Harvard, an Ivy team they were capable of beating.
And even after two bounce-back wins - a shutout of Cornell and a rout of Lafayette - the formula for defeat was exactly the same this time around.
"Our play in the offensive third of the field just wasn't good enough tonight," Capuano said. "We didn't create enough chances, and, obviously, that showed from the score tonight."
But for just a moment in the second half, the Quakers appeared to have created a great opportunity for themselves, and it seemed it as if they might have salvaged a tie.
In the 74th minute, it looked like freshman forward Jessica Fuccello had scored her fourth goal of the season. The celebrating Quakers may have already been arguing whether or not senior captain Tracy Bienenfeld's cross was actually an attempted shot of her own.
In an instant, it all went away. The referee's whistle blew, and the crowd instantly knew what the call was: offsides.
And just like so many times before this season - Ambrose exaggerated that it was the team's seventh disallowed goal of the year - the goal evaporated, and with it went Penn's chance to get its second Ivy win.
It was a single mistake that made the difference for Penn this weekend, but the real problem went much deeper than the bounce of a ball.
"We knew it would be a battle," Ambrose said. "I don't think we battled hard enough."
