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Penn celebrates share of Ivy title with late-night ceremony

03/04/2018, 5:00pm EST
By Josh Verlin

Steve Donahue (above) took Penn from 11 wins to 22 wins in two years. (Photo: Mark Jordan/CoBL)

Josh Verlin (@jmverlin)
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In a way, it was fitting that Penn’s first net-cutting ceremony in 11 years came in an empty Palestra, in the middle of the night.

The Quakers arrived home from Providence, R.I. -- where they’d held off Brown on Saturday evening to clinch a share of the Ivy League regular-season title -- just after 2 AM on Sunday morning. They pulled up in a bus that was packed to capacity with the team, coaches and supporting staff, as well as the approx. 15 cheerleaders and members of the band they’d picked up after that group’s bus broke down 10 minutes after departure.

And they walked into the glorious, old arena at 33rd and Walnut, to the sound of, well, basically nothing. The University is on spring break, so any students that might have thought about walking through a biting wind to join the celebration weren’t around, anyways. Several of the cheerleaders eventually formed a path, greeting the final few players to come down the ramp and onto the court, where a ladder stood waiting under the west basket.

One-by-one the Penn players played out the tradition, scaling the ladder, snipping off a small piece of netting, turning to the team and cheering. The managers, the freshmen up through the seniors, the coaches, and finally head coach Steve Donahue himself, finally freeing the net from its hoop and flinging it toward his team.

Minutes later, A.J. Brodeur had the net around his neck.

“Just being able to do it as like a symbolic thing, coming back as champions in our home gym right after a win, it just seems fitting,” the sophomore forward said. “Whether it’s a packed Palestra or there’s no one here, because at the end of the day it’s our team. We’ve got ourselves here, our amazing staff, our players, our managers, we all got here together. As long as we’re all here, I think that’s enough for us.”

By finishing 12-2 in the Ivy League (22-8 overall), with the same league record as Harvard, Penn assured itself the 26th Ancient Eight title in program history, the fifth that it has shared with at least one other team.

But it’s ultimately the least important of any of them, at least in regards to what it means for the Quakers’ postseason hopes.

In the past, a solo Ivy League regular-season championship meant automatic initiation into the NCAA Tournament, while identical records meant a playoff; only twice, in 1996 and 1981, did Penn win a title and fail to go dancing, losing to co-champion and archrival Princeton in a playoff game both times.

This is the new era of the Ivy, however, the second year of the four-team tournament that now determines the Ivy’s guaranteed representative in the final field of 68. And so Penn’s regular-season record means only that the Quakers are the No. 2 seed in next weekend’s affair, playing Yale in the semifinals with either Harvard or Cornell looming in the championship.

“We did a lot so far in the regular season, but we all know that we have a lot more work to do,” senior guard Darnell Foreman said. “It’s a little half-and-half, but we’re going to take it, just like throughout the whole season; we celebrate our short-term goals, so this is another one.”

That’s not to say the late-night (or is it early-morning?) ceremony was entirely meaningless. Certainly not to Allan Bell, a 1981 Penn graduate and avid Quakers fan, who estimates he’s seen “over 500” Penn basketball games in his now four-plus decades since he was converted instantly into a fan: “When we got here in 1977, the second or third day, you knew,” he said. “You learned that Penn basketball was something special.

Bell would have been at Brown to see Penn’s clincher in person, were it not for a friend’s birthday party in the city. But that meant he and his wife Dale were able to be the sole alumni representation to greet the team at the late hour. And the meaning of the ceremony to the season-ticket holder and father of two Penn graduates was clear as he teared up at the moment, of the end of an 11-year wait that included some of the leanest years in the history of a storied program.

Penn won its first Ivy League championship in 1966. The Quakers hadn’t gone more than six years without a title since.

“Look at my gray hair,” Bell joked. “(The last 10 years) were tough, but I knew we’d be back.”

Donahue, who led Cornell to three straight NCAA Tournaments (2008-10), culminating in the program’s first-ever Sweet 16, has already revived Penn basketball, taking over a program that won nine, eight and nine games in the three years before his arrival and winning 11, 13 and now 22 in his first three years.

He knew this particular title was important given what a once-proud program had struggled through the last decade, how a previously-packed building was reduced to miniscule crowds, even for the rivalry games. And so when director of basketball operations Brad Fadem floated the idea after the Brown win that the Quakers should go cut the Palestra nets down, he didn’t hesitate.

“I said that’s absolutely what we should do,” he said. “I think it makes a lot of sense. This is what these kids think about when they go to college, play college basketball, you cut down the nets...it’s not usually in an empty arena at two in the morning, but there’s a lot of excitement maybe for what’s down the road now, and the goal is to be cutting these down a week from now.”

Donahue understands the net his team cut down Sunday morning isn’t the exact one that the Penn faithful really want. Which is why there was indeed something symbolic about having the ceremony in the middle of the night, almost alone, as sort of a trial run. A net cutting to celebrate something that is meaningful in the big picture but meaningless in the near-term, an empty trophy if two games aren’t won on that same floor one week later.


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