It was all over.
Harvard players rejoiced, as they had grown accustomed to doing, on the field and along the sidelines. Penn players lay spent, left to ponder what might have been - a feeling that they knew all too well. This 1982 Penn football team had gone the way of the 22 others before it: out of the money, without ring, cup, or banner.
The kick had been wide left. The Crimson had escaped a frenzied Franklin Field with a 21-20 victory and an Ivy League Championship to their name.
But a bright flash of yellow changed all of that.
"The penalty is against Harvard! The penalty is against Harvard!" shouted Merrill Reese, longtime Philadelphia Eagles radio announcer, then calling Penn games on account of the NFL strike that year, from high up in the broadcast booth.
The flag, of course, lying innocuously on the artificial turf, meant just that. Harvard was being penalized for roughing the kicker. The scoreboard read 0:00, but junior placekicker Dave Shulman, and the Quakers with him, would have another shot at the title.
Shulman made no mistake about it this time, sending the ball into a 21-mph wind and through the uprights to end 23 years of bitterness and futility. The final score: Penn 23, Harvard 21.
From atop the Philadelphia Electric Company tower, one might have spotted a mob of Red-and-Blue-clad fans on the South Street Bridge, tossing one of Franklin Field's goalposts into the Schuylkill's waters. But only from down below could one read what now scrolled across the building's signature marquee: Ivy Champs!
That miracle game (and the season it was a part of) went down as The Kick that Almost Wasn't. Twenty-five years later, it has lost none of its significance.
Prior to that fateful day, Penn had won just one title since the creation of the league in 1956, and that came in 1959. After a stretch marked primarily by humiliation and losing seasons, 1982 kicked off a string of five straight titles for the Red and Blue, and 12 total from that point on. Harvard, with six, won the next-most championships in that period.
Whether it is causation or just correlation, the fact remains that Penn's position of dominance in the Ancient Eight stemmed from that very day. November 13, 1982.
In that game, the odds were certainly not in Penn's favor to get two chances at a field goal of such magnitude. But really, at every point along the way, in that fated game and during the entire season, the Quakers had faced an uphill battle. The team survived by banding together and routinely accomplishing the improbable, wringing out drop after drop of hope from a towel that had seemed dry for ages.
In the game's early stages, it certainly looked as though the Quakers would do something that was never their style: coast to an easy victory.
The offense, led by senior quarterback Gary Vura, moved the ball at will and had established a 10-0 lead by the end of the first quarter.
But this Penn team had never been an air show. Admittedly undersized and underskilled, the Quakers had relied on their defense all season. Defense, at least, could overcome physical inadequacies. Playing on adrenaline would have to be enough.
"The offense was having a tough time gelling and defense is very much emotion," said fifth-year senior co-captain Mike Christiani, the leader of Penn's defense at linebacker. "I think what characterized that year is emotion. . We did a lot of that old bending and not breaking, and it definitely motivated the offense."
The 34,746 fans in attendance at Franklin Field that day saw Christiani's unit in full force for most of the game, clamping down to shut out a potent Harvard offense until the fourth quarter.
But before the Crimson could get on the board, Penn would tack on another touchdown to make it 20-0 with just 13:19 remaining.
And that's when it all started to go wrong. The home crowd looked on in astonished silence as the Quakers' normally staunch defense surrendered three touchdowns in the course of seven minutes.
Harvard's last trip to the end zone stung most of all, with the Crimson converting a fourth-and-goal from the three-yard-line to take a one-point lead with under two minutes remaining.
"I was dead-set on not having them score that touchdown, and actually almost got kicked out of the game because I kicked the pylon afterwards up to almost the second deck," Christiani recalled. "We came out broken, thinking, 'It's over. We haven't broken all year like that, and here we are, we just gave up a touchdown with very little time left.' "
And so, after the ensuing kickoff, Vura and the offense began their final drive from their own 20-yard line, with two timeouts and 1:24 remaining on the clock.
"He was a confident guy," Christiani said of Vura. "But he got put into a position where we hadn't been all year. He got put in a position where the offense had to win the game, and that was a place where we hadn't been all year."
Things didn't get much better from there, as Penn's first two plays from scrimmage resulted in a one-yard scramble and a sack. The situation had gone from bad to worse, with precious seconds ticking off the clock and a third-and-15 looming. But Vura and the Quakers still had a pulse.
"I hit Rich Syrek downfield for the first down, but as I threw across my body, one of the Harvard defenders got his helmet up against my face mask and drove me right to the ground. As he did that, the chinstrap came up straight across my face and I was completely disoriented and didn't know if I still had a face left. I was completely stunned and dazed."
Penn had new life, but its signal-caller was forced to the sidelines. There he remained for one play, until he came back with more magic up his sleeve.
Still fighting to keep focus, the senior dropped back and fired a bullet to receiver Warren Buehler across the middle. But Buehler got hit as the pass arrived and the ball popped invitingly into the air. A trailing Syrek needed no invitation, however, and plucked it out of the air to complete a play almost as bizarre as the one that would end the game.
"Did that give us some hope? I'm going to speak for myself: no," Christiani said. "I thought, 'that was a great catch, but we still have a long way to go.'"
Christiani did add, however, that it seemed to make Vura believe. With the dispirited linebacker watching from the sideline and the optimistic quarterback on the field making the plays, perhaps it was better that way.
"I was definitely still dazed, but it may have been a blessing in disguise because I had to focus on every word of the play and really to concentrate," Vura said. "I didn't have time to think about the pressure or the enormity of what was going on. I could only use my power to focus on the play at hand and how to execute it."
In the end, all eyes turned to Shulman, who set up for a 38-yard field goal at the west end of Franklin Field with :03 left on the clock. That kick, of course, was destined to float harmlessly wide. But in his mind, there was never any doubt about the ensuing call, and he know immediately he would get another chance.
"It was abundantly clear that I got hit," Shulman said. "I knew when I got clipped that there was something wrong with that play. After the first kick, I refused to believe that the game was over."
Vura, who was holding on the play, was just as sure about the accuracy of referee Robert Lynch's call. Reese, on the other hand, from his vantage point up in the booth, did not see the collision; his eyes were following the ball.
But for each and every person gathered at Franklin Field that day, regardless of whether he or she saw the contact in question, knew exactly what that little yellow flag meant as soon as it emerged.
"They roughed the kicker," Berndt, the Penn coach, told The Daily Pennsylvanian after the game. "But you don't know if that's going to be called or not. My emotions went from Mount Everest to the depths of the ocean back to Mount Everest again."
When the later edition of Shulman's kick split the uprights, it was Everest for good for Berndt, the Quakers, and the Penn faithful gathered there.
And maybe even for Reese, whose repeated cries of "I don't believe it!" may have betrayed his elation at seeing the Red and Blue, whom he had grown up cheering for, get over the hump. The voice of the Eagles since 1977, Reese still counts The Kick that Almost Wasn't among the most amazing plays he has ever called.
For men like Vura, Shulman, Christiani and the others down on the field, the game that changed their lives will always have a special meaning.
"This was clearly a team and a stadium that didn't quite know how to celebrate football championships," Vura said. "It was just a great, just a great feeling. Tremendous relief, tremendous accomplishment, and I think everybody that was on that team not only played a role, but they got a sense that they did something special that year. 25 years later, I think every man knows how special that was."
The 1982 season may have made men out of those involved, but really it was the men involved who made the 1982 season. And no man had a bigger hand in making the season what it was than co-captain Mike Christiani.
A fifth-year senior, Christiani was not even intending to play football in his final academic year at Penn. After battling injuries and bad luck for four years, he was ready to turn his back on a program wallowing in the depths of a losing trend that it just could not seem to buck.
"I'd had enough, I felt like it was time to move on and go to graduate school," he said. "Morale was extremely low, and it kind of perpetuated itself into a losing type of mentality."
But when he reluctantly accepted Berndt's request that he run for team captain, the eye-opening result got Christiani back into his cleats and onto the football field - he had garnered 110 votes out of about 120 players on the team.
And when he began his captainship, his first order of business was to install a set of rules that would weed out that losing mentality by instilling discipline that had long been absent. Players would now take part in rigorous weight-training regimens, and would no longer be seen frequenting campus bars during the week.
But most importantly, he and Berndt agreed to break with the long-standing tradition of leaving sophomores on the bench simply because they were sophomores (freshmen were ineligible for NCAA football).
"We sat down and said, 'Listen, we've got to throw all that stuff out the window," Christiani said. "We've got to play the best players in the best positions, I don't care how old they are or how experienced they are.'"
The decision paid off. Sophomores got the nod at a number of positions, and the inexperienced Quakers progressed by leaps and bounds under Christiani's leadership. Billed as the worst team in college football by Penthouse to start the season, Penn righted its ship and got off to a 4-0 start.
Before the opener against Dartmouth, Brendt famously asked two Penn players to say some words of inspiration to the team. Christiani went second:
"Cut the shit! Cut the pep talks! There's been too much talking at this university and not enough playing."
The Red and Blue went out and handed the Big Green a 21-0 home defeat.
The last time Penn had won at Dartmouth? 1974.
Now, 25 years after the game that changed Penn football, this year's seniors are in danger of being the first class since to graduate without a ring. It is fitting, then, that they should be playing their final season on the 25th anniversary of a campaign that is likely the reason they wear the Red and Blue today.
If it isn't the reason they are at Penn, it is certainly the reason they are expected to win here.
"I didn't have the pressure of not getting a ring because it had been 23 years since Penn had won a title," Vura said. "So the fact that we won a title was a fantastic accomplishment. There was no in between, we went from worst to first."
Christiani knows what this year's seniors must be feeling; he was in a similar situation himself.
"It hasn't been 23 years, but I'll tell you this: to these kids, it feels like 23 years. I guarantee that."
So why talk about the past?
History plays an interesting role in sports, because really, it shouldn't matter what happened last year.
It certainly didn't matter that the '82 team was coming off a 1-9 season.
Or did it? Did that team have such a magical season because it had a higher purpose? Were Vura, Christiani and company winning games only for themselves, or were they doing so with a clear sense of history?
In their case, that sense of history meant being mindful of their task to end an abysmal stretch of losing seasons. But what sense of history could this year's team claim as motivation?
"What I would say to the [2007] team is find your own identity, find your own will and intestinal fortitude, to know where this program has been and what this program means, and bring the cup home," Vura said. "No excuses, don't wait for somebody next to you to make a play - bring the cup home."
Or, on the other hand, is it better to ignore history? If Christiani could address these seniors, he would say yes.
"You guys can't think about the last couple of years," Christiani said. "You can't think about what-ifs, what should-haves, and what have you. This is your team, and this is going to define you, positively or negatively, for a long time. For the rest of your life, especially the seniors. You've got to make a decision: how do you want to be remembered?"
So as this year's team tries to claim its place in the vast lore of Penn football, it might would do well to both remember and forget the past.
It wasn't too long ago that another Penn team was coming off of a title drought rife with losing and embarrassment.
But a bright flash of yellow changed all of that.
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