Saint Joseph's coach Phil Martelli had a lot to say after the Hawks' victory over Penn last Saturday. What was the first thing on his mind? "First, I want to acknowledge the crowd on both sides," he said. "It gives you chills, Saturday night at the Palestra.

I've been to enough Penn sporting events, you see, to develop a little theory about the attendance figures provided in the average box score. They're bogus, baseless, pulled from thin air. What seems to me a quarter-full turnout at the 8,700-seat Palestra looks more like 5,000 to them.

Although it's just 1-0, the men's tennis team will play its last match of the season today against Temple - at least in the mind of coach Nik DeVore. "We won't even answer questions if guys start talking about future matches," DeVore explained. "It's almost like [any future] match doesn't exist.

Fractured tibia or not, senior co-captain Alisha Turner would not miss playing Princeton. Last year Turner battled through her match in the national championship against the Tigers while nursing that injury which she had sustained a few days before. "I guess I have a high pain threshold," Turner said.

Life's not getting a whole lot easier for the men's squash team. Just four days after falling to the dynastic No. 1 Trinity squad, 9-0, the seventh-ranked Quakers travel to Princeton, N.J., tonight to face the Tigers. And though Penn (6-3, 1-2 Ivy) may not stand much of a chance of upsetting No.

Any team looking to get an Ivy League Championship this year has to go through one major obstacle to get there - a Big Red obstacle. After running the table in the Ivies last year, Cornell returns to defend its title with four starters and seven of its top eight scorers back.

Remember back to the days when you were a kid and your neighbor was always getting the latest and greatest toys. He got the Sega and then the PlayStation and then GameCube. And you still had that original SuperNintendo that's been around forever. Sure, it's a classic, but c'mon, who doesn't want a controller that vibrates in their hands? Well, the Ivy League has been like that deprived child for years.

The chips, it seemed, had fallen just right for Columbia last season. The Lions, who hadn't broken .500 in the Ivy League season since 1993, had a team loaded with experience and a pair of formidable big men - a rarity in the Ancient Eight. But 2008 saw the streak continue.

The Brown men's basketball team currently has four players near the top of the Ivy League in minutes played. With this weekend's back-to-back games against defending Ivy League Champion Cornell and Columbia, those high totals could equate to sheer exhaustion for the Bears' starters as their Ivy League season gets underway.

It wasn't very long ago that the Ivy League men's basketball season consisted of a two-horse race, with each contender starting with the letter 'P.' Since the start of the 1958-59 season, the Ancient Eight has crowned 54 champions and co-champions. Princeton and Penn have earned a combined 50 of them.

Yale didn't exactly have a stellar non-conference season at 5-9. But after two contests with Brown, the Bulldogs boast a five-game win streak and their first 2-0 Ivy start since 2001-2002. Two tight wins over last year's Ancient Eight runner-up are impressive.

Depending on how far one can stretch the transitive property, Dartmouth could very well stake a de facto claim to the nation's top spot. The perennial Ivy League bottom-feeder turned heads in the Ivy League this Saturday by making neat work of Harvard in overtime, putting away the Crimson by a decisive 75-66 score in Boston.

The last time Carrie Biemer scored fewer than 10 points in a game was Jan. 15, 2008, in a 67-50 loss at Seton Hall. As fate would have it, Biemer's 27-game double-digit scoring streak was snapped yesterday by that same Seton Hall squad, as the senior captain was held to nine points and zero rebounds.

Change is the hot word nowadays. But what about fairness? In a mad rush to dole out carrots, it's easy to forget the importance of the stick. That's why I'm not sure conference tournaments are such a good idea - in any sport, in any league, including Ivy League lacrosse, one of the conference's shining beacons of success amid a sea of backsliding mediocrity.

Say what you want about Tommy Amaker. Just don't say he doesn't win. In just its second year under Amaker, the historically derelict Harvard appears to be reviving. The Crimson (9-7, 1-1 Ivy) put up a better-than-expected performance in Ivy League play last year, and started the 2008-09 season with a head-turning non-conference performance.

After thirteen days off, the Penn women's basketball team is looking to start their season anew. The Quakers (3-10, 0-1 Ivy) will face Seton Hall (13-6) at the Palestra tonight in their final non-conference matchup of the season. But the Quakers aren't underestimating the significance of the game on their way to the start of the Ivy season.

With 24 seasons of Big 5 hostilities in his memory bank, Phil Martelli knows full well what the Philadelphia fan is capable of. Which helps explain why the Saint Joseph's coach might have expected worse from an electric sellout crowd at the Palestra Saturday night.