Quaker Meeting House (QMH) knew the place to be on Sunday: The Penn Squash Center.
 
Why? Well, how long had it been since the University of Pennsylvania men's squash team had won an outright Ivy League championship? If you ask QMH, it had quite literally been a lifetime. The last time the Quakers went unbeaten through the Ancient Eight, their clinching match was a heart-stopping, 5-4 victory over Harvard—the Quakers' first win ever over the Crimson.

The date was February 15, 1969. One day later, QMH was born.
 
So there was QMH on Sunday around 11:45, in the Penn Squash Center as the Penn and Cornell men's and women's teams began lining up in courts 1 and 2 in order of how they would play on the ladder. The captains for both squads stood outside the glass, the coaches between the courts. After some words from each of the coaches, the captains read out their respective lineups, the players all shook hands, and at approximately 12:05 the matches were underway.
 
QMH was not alone, of course. Penn Athletics showed out on Sunday, with lots of other coaches and staff members milling about the viewing areas. There were parents, and friends, and of course folks who just love the game. In all, it was a celebratory atmosphere and a really nice show of support for a pair of coaches who are as good as they come, Gilly Lane and Jack Wyant.
 
Everyone who showed up got exactly what they came for—a coronation.
 
Two of Penn's All-Americans, Andrew Douglas and James Flynn, didn't suit up on Sunday. It didn't matter. Using three courts to play the nine matches—each match counting as one point—the Quakers swept the first wave in short order, and it quickly became a matter of which player in the second wave would have the honor of getting Penn that insurmountable fifth point. It turned out to be sophomore Dana Santry, who briefly stumbled with a loss in his third game before he took the fourth to clinch his best-of-five match at 1:47 p.m. Not that Penn needed it; the Quakers ended up rolling past the Big Red 9-0 (27-4 in games).
 
It was a far cry from the previous day, when Penn's ride to history almost hit a Philly-sized pothole.
 
Penn was at Princeton on Saturday. This was originally scheduled to be the last match of the regular season; the Quakers had been slated to face Cornell the previous Sunday. But when the Big Red couldn't get out of Ithaca due to excessive snow, that match was pushed back a week. So suddenly the Princeton match would only give Penn a tie for the Ivy crown, a win there bringing the Quakers home for Sunday's closeout.
 
The Quakers, the College Squash Association's top-ranked team all season, got all they could handle in Tigertown. Five of Saturday's nine matches needed the full five games, with two others going four.
 
Princeton won the first two matches, and after Penn earned the next four points with wins by Yash Bhargava (at No. 6), Roger Baddour (at No. 8), Dillon Huang (at No. 4) and Aly Abou Eleinen (at No. 2) the Tigers won the next two.
 
That left the score tied at 4-4 with just one match in the balance: Penn junior Saksham Choudhary against Princeton's Alastair Cho at No. 7.
 
At that point there was also this tidbit, though no one dared say it aloud and jinx things: Choudhary had never—never—lost a regular-season match. He entered the day 26-0.
 
Choudhary won the first game, 11-6. Cho took the second, 11-5. Choudhary took the third, 11-6. And then, with his teammates getting louder with every passing point, Choudhary closed it out with an 11-8 win in the fourth.
 
Choudhary: 27-0. Penn: 6-0.
 
Saturday's win clinched Penn a share of the title; already done at 6-1, second-place Harvard could now only hope the Quakers, 6-3 winners over the Crimson back on January 15, would somehow stumble against Cornell on Sunday. (That win in January, by the way? It ended a 38-match win streak by Harvard that stretched back to the 2018 season, 19 of the wins coming against Ivy foes.)
 
Penn wasn't about to stumble. Not to Cornell. Not at home. Not with all those people, QMH included, there to witness it.
 
What Coach Lane has done with this program is nothing short of amazing. You might recall the Quakers briefly earned a No. 1 ranking from the College Squash Association (CSA) during the 2018-19 season. One year later, in 2019-20, they finished a best-ever second in the Ivy standings to Harvard, then took second at the CSA Team Championships with a loss in the final to, you guessed it, the Crimson. Six of the men from that nine-man ladder were in the lineup this past weekend. Two of them, Douglas and Bhargava, took advantage of the Ivy League's one-time COVID exception and remained on campus as grad students just so they could see this thing through.
 
As for the history that was made on Sunday, here's what you need to know about college squash: It's not H-Y-P, it's H-T-P. Consider these facts…
 
*In the Ivy League, Harvard won its first title in 1959. Since then—we're talking 62 seasons later—a team other than Harvard or Princeton has won the title outright a grand total of six times. SIX! That would be Penn in 1969…Yale in 1990, 2010, 2011, and 2016…and now Penn in 2022.
 
*The CSA Team Championships is where the T comes in. That would be T as in Trinity College, the little NESCAC school up in Hartford, Conn. In 58 Championships stretching back to 1963, Harvard has won the title 28 times, Trinity has won 17—including a staggering 13 in a row from 1999-2011—and Princeton has won nine. That leaves just four for everyone else: Navy in 1967 and Yale in 1989, 1990 and 2016.
 
So yeah, it means that what's happening right now with the Penn men's program is pretty special. You know what else it means? There's still a chance for even more significant history to be made. The Quakers will host the CSA Team Championships from February 18-20 in the fabulously renovated Penn Squash Center.
 
By the way, with all this talk about the men, let's acknowledge that Sunday still had plenty of drama. It just happened to come over on the women's side.
 
The Penn women entered the day ranked ninth in the latest CSA poll, with Cornell at No. 8. The way the Championships work is that you get placed in various flights based on your ranking. So the top eight teams play for the Howe Cup, which is considered the women's national championship. Teams ranked 9-16 play for the Kurtz Cup, 17-24 play for the Walker Cup, and 25-32 play for the Epps Cup. So yeah, Sunday's match was huge. To put it in college basketball parlance, the winner figured to get an NCAA bid while the loser was likely headed to the NIT.
 
Consider Penn's NCAA ticket punched.
 
Penn was up 2-1 after the first three-match wave, Amina Abou El Enin winning at No. 5 and Navmi Sharma at No. 9. Cornell leveled things at 3-3 through the second wave, Emma Wolf's win at No. 8 offsetting losses at No. 6 and No. 1. That left things in the hands of Avni Anand at No. 3, Yoshna Singh at No. 4, and Emma Carter at No. 7.
 
It was hard to keep pace. As soon as a point ended on one court, QMH turned to watch a point in progress on another court. When that point ended, head on a swivel to find one of the other matches in play.
 
The drama built as Singh and Carter split their first two games, while Anand got a leg up by winning her first two. Carter won her third but lost her fourth, forcing a winner-take-all fifth. Singh won her third, while Anand lost her third.
 
As the crowds got bigger and louder with each passing point, the ending came with a stunning swiftness. Singh rallied back from being down a game point to win three points in a row, giving her a 12-10 victory and clinching her match for Penn's fourth point. Mere seconds later (literally), Anand closed out her match with an 11-5 victory that gave the Quakers the insurmountable fifth point. Carter's 11-7 game-five win came only a few minutes after that, putting a tidy bow on a pulsating 6-3 victory.
 
It had been a lot of pressure. Carter, a freshman, looked like she might pass out as the final point ended, but her teammates were able to keep her from dropping to the floor as they flowed onto Court 6 to congratulate her and celebrate their victory.
 
The two wins made for a lot of happy faces later in the day, when the men were presented their Ivy championship trophy on Court 1. One of the smiling faces (at least QMH assumes it was a smile since she was masked)? Alanna Shanahan, who now has her first Ivy title as Penn's AD.
 
In all, it was a great Sunday at the Penn Squash Center. QMH hopes to have another one just like it in a few weeks.