There are many words you could use to describe Yale's John J. Lee Amphitheater, home of the Elis basketball team.
Historic. Cozy. Church-like.
If you're a Penn basketball player, you might have some other words to describe it, few of which are suitable to be printed in this newspaper.
For the Quakers, the trip to John J. Lee has not been an enjoyable one the last three years.
While the current senior class has won its home games against Yale by eight, 24 and 18, the results up in New Haven have been a little different.
Last year, Penn barely hung on, surviving a buzzer-beater after blowing a 17-point lead in a 57-55 win.
The year before, Penn went 13-1 in the league, with the one being a 78-60 defeat at Yale. And three years ago, the trip was part of a nightmare opening weekend, in which Penn lost to Brown and Yale en route to a 10-4 season.
And this year, who knows? Is 14-0 a real possibility? The answer is yes, if the Quakers can get through the one game that seems to haunt them every year.
While the Palestra is known as a "cathedral" for those who prefer bleachers to kneelers, it is the creepy old John J. Lee Amphitheater that more fits that billing.
The old wooden seats and the echoes make the building rock when the Elis make a run. And when Penn comes to town, the fans show up.
"They have a tough arrangement," senior captain Ibrahim Jaaber said. "The fans are right on top of the court. I don't really want to compare it to Duke, but you can almost feel the presence of the crowd. For some people it gets into their heads, and for some people it doesn't."
One person whose head it never affected is Glen Miller. While the rest of the league was 8-28 at John J. Lee in the last six years, Miller's Brown squad was 4-2.
Maybe that's why Miller isn't concerned with the atmosphere as much as he is with his team's preparation for the second game in two nights.
"We've always had a week to prepare for them [at Brown]," Miller said. "And now we're going to play them on the second night."
On paper, one gets the feeling that the Elis don't have the roster with which they've given Penn fits in the past. I'd take Edwin Draughan, Alex Gamboa, Matt Minoff and Domnick Martin before I'd take Eric Flato, Casey Hughes, Sam Kaplan and Caleb Holmes.
But the Elis have finished 7-7 the last three seasons and this year are off to a 3-1 start, albeit against Brown twice, Harvard and Dartmouth.
So Saturday will come as no cakewalk for the Quakers. Not after a pretty long bus ride and a Friday game that Stephen Danley said would put everyone's legs at "95 percent."
If the Quakers can escape their house of horrors and come out with a win, even if it's another two-point win after blowing a 17-point lead, they'll be on their way to 14-0.
Unless they lose to Brown the night before. But that's a whole different story.
Zachary Levine is a senior mathematics major from Delmar, N.Y., and is former Sports Editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian. His e-mail address is zlevine@sas.upenn.edu.
