With his team sporting a 13-0 lead over No. 14 Penn, one boisterous Hofstra wrestling fan couldn't resist the urge to gloat.
"Who's stronger now?" he hollered at Penn's Matt Valenti, who was locked in an epic quintuple-overtime match with the Pride's Lou Ruggirello.
Valenti answered, finally overpowering Ruggirello one overtime later. But the Hofstra fan - and the wrestlers - got the last laugh. The No. 6 Pride won every match except that one en route to a 31-3 romp over Penn on Friday.
The Quakers, head coach Zeke Jones said, "came out flat" in their first home match of the year, and it showed.
In the first matchup, No. 13 Lior Zamir seemed to lose traction after an illegal hold penalty and his opponent, No. 7 Joe Rovelli, stretched his lead from 4-3 to 6-3 on a reversal shortly thereafter and went on to win.
Hostra then jumped out to a 7-0 lead after Penn's Jack Sullivan fell by a major decision.
"The great ones steal the momentum back," Jones said. "The great teams, the great individuals, when the momentum's against them, they find a way to get it."
Penn could not. Hofstra, under first-year coach Tom Shifflet, looked like a team on a mission - like the team that had beaten No. 1 Minnesota earlier this year - while the Quakers looked afraid to make a stand on their own turf.
No. 11 Matt Eveleth was poised to steal a decision to put Penn on the board, but Hofstra's Dave Tomasette - himself ranked at No. 18 - threw Eveleth off his back with under 30 seconds to go in regulation for a takedown and a 2-0 win.
So by the time Valenti hit the mats, Penn was already in a 13-0 hole, and the hammer would stay firmly in Hofstra's hands.
"We needed this match," Shifflet said. "I told [the team] there's going to be some gut checks during this dual meet and we need to push ourselves."
That pushing came too hard and too soon for the Quakers to adjust to - and when they did, the results didn't reflect it.
After Penn lost the first two matches, the Quakers' Ben Reiter tried to take control of Matt Pollock in the heavyweight division. Reiter went for a takedown with under a minute left in regulation but ended up on the wrong end of it. That moved the scoring margin from one to three, and Reiter did not have enough time to mount a comeback.
The loss drops Penn to 3-5 overall. The Quakers still have not beat a higher-ranked team this year in five tries, and the next chance they will have to do so will probably come in conference play, which begins next weekend against Brown.
Matt Dragon and Matt Herrington, two of the Quakers' top competitors, both dropped close matches after Penn's fate was already decided. And after seeing some of Penn's best wrestlers let close matches slip away, it's hard not to think a win was never in the cards for Penn.
Of the six ranked wrestlers who roamed the Penn sidelines before the match, four were matched up against even higher-ranked opponents. With their best weapons shut down, the burden fell to the unranked wrestlers to try to take back the match for Penn.
But either Hofstra was better from top to bottom or the Quakers were simply overmatched. Jones himself thought the latter was more likely, but that the trend would not continue.
"Very rarely do you ever go through a season and you don't have a flat performance," Jones said. "I think we finally got that one done."
