Wednesday's practice for the men's squash team was just like any other - relaxed, with plenty of jokes and racquets flying around. For four seniors this week of practice at the Ringe Squash Courts will be their last. Coming up on the last hurrah of their squash careers at this weekend's College Squash Association Championship, the eldest Quakers want their departure to be memorable.

It may be the weekend, but the Penn women's tennis team has an exam on Saturday. The subject: Virginia Commonwealth, in Richmond, Va. "I think this weekend we're going to find out how we're playing," coach Mike Dowd said. "When we're playing a team of this level we're going to find out where we are as a team and what we're going to need to work on afterwards.

The Quakers seek revenge today and pray for an upset tomorrow. This afternoon, the No. 28 Quakers (11-4) will take the mat against aspiring rival Columbia. Last year the Lions upset the then-No. 16 ranked Quakers by a score of 22-12. But this time, the Lions won't have home-mat advantage, a factor that some Quakers believe played a role in last season's loss.

Since its formation in 1954, the Ivy League has been perhaps the most stable conference in Division I. It has enjoyed a remarkable level of parity and is still the only D-I league whose membership has never changed. But the distribution of financial aid money - and its effect on athletics - is threatening to upset that balance.

Five percent. That's the current intra-conference road winning percentage of Ivy League teams not named "Cornell." Brown is 0-1. Yale is 0-1. Penn is 0-2. Princeton is 0-3. Dartmouth is 0-5. Harvard is 0-5. Columbia is a real road warrior by comparison, with its relatively sparkling 1-3 record away from Levien Gymnasium.

Last season, the Harvard women's basketball team broke away from the pack to claim the conference crown by four games. This year, with the bottom three teams a combined 1-15 in Ivy play, there was bound to be a little more congestion at the top. A month into the Ancient Eight season, the defending champs find themselves in a three-way tie for first with Cornell and Dartmouth.

With its members scrambling to stay on the vanguard of financial-aid generosity, the Ivy League may do one of two things. It could keep its current model of need-based aid, or it could - theoretically - form a new one. Penn athletic director Steve Bilsky said the current model will result in a competitive imbalance.

The first Penn-Princeton affair of the year did not feature the high stakes of past meetings. Each team had a 2-2 Ivy League record coming in. But for all the talk of rebuilding, Penn has not fallen as far as Princeton. The Quakers' 70-65 victory gave them a winning mark in the Ivy League and pushed the Tigers (5-15, 2-3 Ivy) further into the conference doldrums as their slump now approaches four years.

Whether students were attempting to relive the past glory of the rivalry or hanging on to the slight hope that the Quakers could turn the season around, the Red and Blue Crew was out in full force for last night's game. "Everybody always comes out for Penn-Princeton," said senior Abraham Dauhajre, who shows up to every home game in a taco costume.

The stats didn't support the outcome tonight. Penn shot 38.6 percent from the field and Princeton shot 50 percent. Penn converted 17 baskets and Princeton had 24. Penn scored 20 points in the paint and Princeton had 42. Yet the Quakers still won. Princeton had a distinct advantage in almost every offensive number but one - free-throw shooting.

The cursory numbers are enough to tell you about the Penn-Princeton basketball rivalry over the past few decades. The two P's have had a hand in 46 of the past 49 Ivy titles. In the past 19 seasons, no other Ivy team has been to the NCAA tournament. Three years and three Penn Ivy titles later, the rivalry had lost something.

Recently I was perusing the Web site "I can has cheezburger?" when I happened upon a Lolcat that is somewhat pertinent to this year's Penn-Princeton men's basketball contest. (If you don't know what this is, please Google.) The picture shows two cats wearing crab-shaped head coverings with the caption, "can't believe we both got crabs.

Noah Savage didn't belong on the bench. At least not the Noah Savage that was one of Princeton's top players in his freshman and sophomore seasons. The one that started 55 games in a row to begin his college career and averaged 6.4 points in his first season and 10 points in his second.

I'm going to admit it: Princeton was almost my first choice when I applied to college. And for my first few months at Penn - when things sometimes got a little overwhelming - I wondered what it would be like had I made my home-away-from-home patrician New Jersey.

When the use of data analysis seeped into the Roger Clemens steroids saga, four Penn professors shifted their focus from the Wharton curve to the Rocket's splitter. On Jan. 28, Hendricks Sports Management, the agency that represents the seven-time Cy Young Award-winner, released an 18,000-word statistical report aimed at disputing that Clemens had taken performance-enhancing drugs.

It certainly isn't the first time that Penn and Princeton will come into a game at the Palestra neck-and-neck in the Ivy League standings. And it certainly won't be the last. But in this new era of Ancient Eight basketball, the historic rivalry game won't be a battle for first place, or even for second.

Two more games, two more losses. The streak now stands at 14 for the women's basketball team. Despite playing at home, Penn lost 70-61 to the Lions (7-13, 4-2 Ivy) on Friday and 80-56 to the Big Red (13-6, 5-1) on Saturday. In both games, the Quakers (3-17, 0-5 Ivy) came out sluggish, down 25-12 at one point against Columbia and 27-14 against Cornell.