A victory for the Quakers -- and the goal posts

Hundreds of students flooded onto Franklin Field after the Penn football team defeated Harvard, 44-9, Saturday afternoon -- but to many fans' dismay, the goal posts weren't as easy to bring down as Penn's Ivy League opponents.

Fans chanted "goal-post! goal-post!" for the few remaining minutes of the game, which had been featured earlier in the day on the ESPN show College GameDay and was carried regionally on the YES network, as they trickled down the stands toward the front, knowing that Penn was about to clinch a share of the Ivy League title.

But instead, a bench from the sidelines and a few pieces of patio furniture were rumored to have ended up in the Schuylkill River, after a half-hour of jiggling the 40-foot structure proved to be fruitless.

Franklin Field event staff and Penn Police guarded the eastern goal post initially when the crowd stormed the field, but soon gave way to the rain-drenched mob.

During the post-game revelry, Penn Police arrested two students -- College freshman Jack Cohen and Wharton sophomore Brian Quinn -- for disorderly conduct.

Cohen was escorted to the police station for throwing a traffic cone into the river, and after speaking with Police Chief Tom Rambo said he has "no hard feelings."

"I appreciate what they did," Cohen said. "They just stood around and let us destroy Penn property."

Wharton freshman Tim Mahoney was one of dozens of students who swung on the slippery white poles in hopes of toppling it.

"We were rockin' it, but the po-po got on our nerves," Mahoney said, shirtless in the 45-degree air with red body paint smeared across his chest. "We hope to come back and finish the job later when the resistance is less severe."

Yet, the goal posts still stand.

And it may be that no amount of Penn student brawn will destroy them -- athletic officials said in 2000 that they replaced the goal posts with stronger ones after they came down and ended up in the river during the 1998 Ivy championship celebration.

"To improve technology is a horrible thing," Mahoney said.

After students tried to destroy the posts on both sides of the field -- police blocked the western goal post -- a student from the College of Staten Island said he proposed to sacrifice a bench instead.

"I grabbed it, and I screamed out, 'A bench is just as good as a pole!' and then everybody jumped in."

Police encouraged much of the crowd to vacate after half an hour -- just in time to catch a female student lifting her shirt up, grabbing the beard of a male fan straddling the crossbar next to her and planting a kiss on his mouth -- but many students decided to follow the raucous furniture toters.

And to the accompaniment of three Penn band members playing the traditional Penn favorite, "Drink a High Ball," students dropped the furnishings into the water below.

2002 Penn graduate Eric Goldberg said he was a freshman in 1998, the last time fans were successful in tearing down a goal post and dumping it into the Schuylkill.

"We had the whole football team jumping on the tops of trucks on I-76 and everything -- it was ridiculous," Goldberg said. "It's been pretty pathetic the past few years."

While efforts eventually proved to be in vain this time around, some bystanders said it looked like fans were going to get the goal posts to fall.

"They definitely have a lot of persistence," College freshman Renee Pristas said, as the posts swayed and creaked auspiciously. "I think it's going to pay off in the long run."

Many students said they were astounded that the task was impossible for Penn's highly-ranked student body.

"I'm kind of disappointed with our lack of engineering ability in taking down this goal post," College freshman Elise Martin said.

And others had their own ideas about how the feat could be accomplished more effectively.

"We definitely just needed more people, definitely more fat people, too," Goldberg said. "Just load up more people on the goal post so it tips forward instead of rocking it side to side."

"There were too many people trying to be heroes up there," Wharton senior Brett Topche said. "You just needed a couple people on each side, and the guys in the middle were messing everything up."

But in spite of failing to tear down the goal posts, many students found the celebration fun anyway.

"The whole thing is very entertaining," Pristas said. "It just shows the amount of school spirit that we have here at Penn."

And ESPN has it immortalized on tape.

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