Quaker Meeting House (QMH) doesn't normally travel with football, but when the 2017 schedule came out he knew he was likely to make the road trip to Lehigh.
 
When QMH worked at Dartmouth, he always enjoyed the football season. His boss, the late Kathy Slattery, would rent a minivan for all of the road games, and the SID office would travel with the radio crew and of course Bruce Wood, who at the time wrote for the local Valley News and continues to be well-known in Ivy League circles for his Big Green Alert blog. We would leave Hanover on Friday morning, and the goal was to be on-site in time for the team's walk-through. Traveling separate from the team also allowed us to get our work done post-game without having to worry about missing the bus—a common concern in those pre-Internet days!
 
Kathy was a creature of habit, so depending on the trip she had certain stops that always needed to be made. Every trip to Princeton or Penn, for instance, included a Friday stop at Baltusrol because she had struck up a great relationship with the folks there—Kathy was a tremendous golfer—and the ride home always included a stop at a Friendly's just north of Springfield, Mass. (Ice cream was always a good idea after the Penn game, which was traditionally Week 1; not so much for Princeton, which was always Week 10.)
 
The conversation, as you might imagine, usually focused on Dartmouth athletics. It was dominated by football, of course, but we might roll through 10 other teams and dozens of other athletes during the course of the drive. One of Kathy's most impressive traits was her ability to remember athletes; we would pass exit signs on the highway, and she would recall athletes who came from the hometowns listed on the sign. Trips home, of course, were a rehash of the game we had witnessed—the good, the bad, the ugly.
 
They were good times.
 
QMH tries to foster that camaraderie when he can, but the dynamic is a lot different these days. The fall is filled with competitions, so it's hard to justify pulling everyone away just for football. It's easier to travel with the team these days, too, with wireless on the buses. Our radio folks are coming from other parts of the city, so it would be a lot harder to find a meeting space, especially on the ride back when everyone just wants to get home. As for QMH's staff, they have their own lives to lead and their own teams to cover. QMH likes to give them breaks when he can.
 
There are only a few football games that can pull the staff together for a road trip. Princeton is one, of course, because it's less than an hour away and the football game is usually part of an entire day of Penn-Princeton games. The staff can make an entire day of it. Columbia and Yale are also within reach, although the first time the staff did an outing to Yale it ended up being about an 18-hour day. That has quelled the excitement since.
 
Outside of the conference, the best bets in QMH's time at Penn have been Villanova, Lafayette and Lehigh because they are all easy drives from Philadelphia. With a 12:30 kickoff time last Saturday, QMH was up at his regular time, got a bike ride in on the Schuylkill Trail, left his house in Fairmount around 9:45, and was parking next to Lehigh's Goodman Stadium about 11:15.
 
He was glad he made the trip.
 
QMH has seen a lot of football in person, and he has gridiron memories to last a lifetime. He was a visitor to Franklin Field when he saw a play that had never happened before and, thanks to NCAA rules, will never happen again: a kicker returning his own kickoff for a touchdown. He saw some Jay Fiedler miracles at Dartmouth, but he was also there for the 1993 opener when Penn snuffed Fielder and Co. at Franklin Field, 10-6—the start of two-straight unbeaten campaigns by the Quakers. He worked with Northwestern football for a magical 2000 season that saw the Wildcats win a share of the Big Ten title and along the way pull out dramatic games at Wisconsin, at Minnesota, and at home against Michigan—a game he will always consider the greatest he's ever seen in person.
 
On an absolutely gorgeous day in the Lehigh Valley, QMH witnessed a game that was right up there with all of those. Penn and Lehigh combined for 112 points and 1,167 yards and averaged a staggering 8.4 yards per play. QMH will spare you all the records and firsts, but as you probably know by now it was the highest-scoring game in Penn football history, by aggregate score, and the first time the Quakers pinned 65 points on a team since 1946. Amazingly, it could have been worse: Karekin Brooks busted up the gut for a 61-yard TD gallop in the game's final minutes, only to have it called back due to a holding call. That would have given Brooks 321 rushing yards for the day, and Penn would have had 71 points with a chance to kick for 72. Ridiculous.
 
Brooks also had a jump-pass for a touchdown; in the name of Tim Tebow, when was the last time you saw that play at the college level? The receiver on that play was David Ryslik, who wears No. 96 and normally lines up as a defensive lineman. Let's see, what else? Oh yeah, Christian Pearson caught a TD pass that basically bounced off a Lehigh defender and hit him in stride. Penn fumbled the only ball that Lehigh punted all day. Justin Watson scored on a swing pass for 54 yards that justified every NFL scout's presence at Goodman (and there were a few). The teams combined for 16 touchdowns and didn't attempt even one field goal.
 
It was one crazy football game.
 
One of QMH's favorite moments from Saturday came after Penn intercepted Lehigh's final two-point conversion and ran it back for two points of its own, the Quakers' 64th and 65th points of the day. The play is unusual—thus fitting the theme of the day—and in stat parlance it is listed as a Defensive PAT. As Jay Cammon completed his 100-plus yard journey from end zone to end zone, QMH announced to the press box that it was Penn's first Defensive PAT since 2011. At least two people expressed astonishment that he was able to come up with that fact so quickly. As it happened, QMH had been rummaging through the Football Fact Book, trying to keep up with all the records being set, and was on a page labeled "The Last Time…" when the play occurred. As it became obvious Cammon was going to score QMH scanned the listing, and sure enough there it was: Justyn Williams recorded a Defensive PAT against Lafayette on September 17, 2011. Serendipitous!
 
Finally, when was the last time you heard of a player from a defensive unit that gave up 47 points earning Defensive Player of the Week honors? It happened to Nick Miller, and although it seems preposterous it actually made sense. On a day when Penn kept Lehigh out of the end zone just four times—one of those coming on downs late in the game, when the Mountain Hawks were chasing the game—he was directly responsible for two of those occasions with a forced fumble and an interception.
 
The football team's historic day was just one of a number of highlights on Saturday. The biggest might have come in Cambridge, where the women's soccer team knocked off the defending Ivy League champion Harvard. In the process, they beat the Crimson for the first time since 2012 and won on Harvard's Ohiri Field for the first time since 2007. Heck, Saturday's game marked the first time anyone on the Penn roster had seen a goal scored against Harvard.
 
Field hockey got its Ivy League season off to a good start, with a 2-0 win over Cornell at Ellen Vagelos Field. One day later, the Quakers knocked off the No. 22 team in the country on the road, their fourth win in the last five games. Harvard is also the defending Ivy champion in that sport, too, and the Quakers are in Cambridge this Saturday at noon looking to put their stamp on this year's title chase. Meanwhile, at home, both soccer teams will host Cornell this weekend as the women meet the Big Red Friday night and the men kick off Ivy play on Saturday night. Both games will start at 7 p.m.
 
Also on Friday night, Penn's football team is at home. The opponent? Dartmouth. The game is part of the Ivy League's TV package with NBC Sports Network, so you can turn on your TV and watch the game live if you can't make it to Philly.
 
Sadly, the days of Dartmouth's Caravan are gone. The current SID, Rick Bender, will travel with the team on the buses. Bruce Wood will drive down with his wife, and they will head up to his alma mater (Penn State) on Saturday morning to catch the Nittany Lions game against Indiana. The Valley News reporter will be Tris Wykes, who (gulp) was a high-school student and volunteered in the sports information office when QMH worked up there. QMH doesn't know the radio guys anymore. Everyone will find their own way to Franklin Field, and their own way back to the Upper Valley afterward.
 
None of them, QMH is willing to bet, will stop at Friendly's on the way home.