It ended up as a typical weekend of Ivy League basketball, with everything that entails. Sparse crowds, bad defense, bad offense, terrible officiating and Penn and Princeton winning.
How refreshing.
With all the forces rippling through the conference - the rise of peers like the Patriot League; coaching transitions at Harvard, Princeton, Brown and Penn; fear of a league stratified by financial aid - it was not unreasonable to think that this season might mark a turning point in a new era, or at least a new balance of power. The pundit-anointed frontrunner, Cornell, seemed to embody that reality.
The Week One results say: Not so fast.
At this stage, Penn and Princeton are coping with the rise of Cornell the best way possible. They are each 2-0.
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The Penn and Princeton powers of yore would have been surprised at how their current versions did it. Penn, once the conference bully who ran over everyone with speed and skill, won two games with offensive rebounding. And Princeton, the team that long ago turned 45-40 victories into an art form, beat Harvard 68-54 on Saturday. Since when does any Tigers team - never mind one that lost 12 straight - score 68 points?
In that sense, we may in fact be seeing two new coaching visions making an imprint on the Ivy League's most important teams. Glen Miller and Sydney Johnson will always have to balance change with continuity, and the Quakers and Tigers that they'll be cultivating will no doubt play differently than their predecessors. So far, at least, they're still winning, still the proverbial Nos. 1 and 2.
It's what we've gotten accustomed to, and for good reason. The last time anyone else went Dancing was Cornell in 1988.
You can't read too much into Penn's victories, but they do mean that the Quakers will likely be in it 'til the end, even if the Big Red is the team making March flight plans.
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It was also refreshing to see Penn looking more like a team mounting a title campaign and less like one resigned to a rebuilding year.
We've gotten used to having six or seven faces we know will play 20 minutes a night, a by-product of the Dunphy years. True to form, the Quakers' rotation tightened up over the weekend, shutting out Aron Cohen and Conor Turley in the process.
And we're used to seeing the best in Penn's personnel shine through. That seems to be happening as well. In a season where the shadows of Mark Zoller and Ibrahim Jaaber have never loomed longer, Jack Eggleston and Kevin Egee are starting to cast ones of their own.
Cornell had made Ivy League basketball exciting and novel this year, but by Saturday night Penn and Princeton had overseen a temporary return to normalcy, however brief it might turn out to be.
Andrew Scurria is a junior International Relations major from Wilmington, Del. and is former Senior Sports Editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian. His e-mail address is scurria@dailypennsylvanian.com
