Jeremy Dubert: Home sweet home: the Palestra

The Palestra, even after being refurbished three years ago, is one of the old, venerable vestiges of an earlier era in college basketball. New facilities spring up constantly across collegiate and professional sports, as demands for more luxury boxes, increased media space, improved weight rooms and other amenities contribute to the growing trend. But the Palestra, for all the signs of being in its 77th year of use, continues to be extraordinarily effective in performing its most critical responsibility -- providing a terrific home-court advantage for Penn. And it has been especially apparent in league games over the past few years. Excluding the annual holiday on which Princeton comes to town, the Quakers have won 28 of their last 29 Ivy League home games. This includes a 21-game winning streak from 1997- 2002. The lone slip-up in that stretch was last year's memorable and shocking 54-53 loss to Columbia. Prior to that, you have to go all the way back to Feb. 15, 1997 and a 60-58 loss to Yale to find the last non-Princeton home defeat to an Ivy. This bodes extremely well for the Red and Blue to take an early stranglehold on the conference in 2003. Penn already knocked around Dartmouth and Harvard this past weekend at the Palestra to open league play, and five of the Quakers' first seven games of the Ivy season will take place right here on 33rd Street. Even more encouraging from a Penn perspective is that the only two road contests in that stretch, which come this weekend, are against two clubs that spend most of their time trying to get out of their own way -- Cornell and Columbia. While, of course, anything can happen -- see last year's Columbia result -- the Quakers should be less apt to fall victim to the early-season trap than it was last year, and have the talent to emerge with a pair of victories on this weekend's roadtrip. If Penn can, in fact, return with a 4-0 record, it might be staring a 7-0 start right in the face, if the home-court trend holds true to form. "This is a really big stretch that we have," Penn coach Fran Dunphy said after the Red and Blue cruised past Harvard on Saturday night. "And we need to really pay attention to every detail we have in front of us." By the time Penn finishes its game against Brown at the Palestra on Feb. 15th, the Quakers should be in fantastic position to repeat as league champions. It is even conceivable to picture a perfect 14-0 romp through the Ivies. We at Penn have become accustomed to -- perhaps spoiled by -- undefeated campaigns, since Penn has attained this feat four times in the last decade. But the point is that such a run will probably not be necessary. A strong start to the season by Penn, made increasingly possible by its frontloaded home schedule, could remove much of the pressure in the second half of the year. For example, last year Penn, Princeton and Yale all tied for the league title with 11-3 records. If such a mark were again sufficient to qualify for the postseason, Penn could get by in the difficult, road-heavy latter stages of the year by merely being very good -- or even very average -- rather than dominant. The key is winning the games it should win early in the year -- especially those at home. In Fran Dunphy's tenure with the Quakers, Penn has gone undefeated at home five times. Not surprisingly, that has led to an Ivy League championship on each occasion. After the Harvard game, Dunphy said, "We went up there last year and they beat us, and I'm quite sure that when we go up there again this year, it's going to be a war." That makes the next ten days especially critical. If the Quakers embark on the challenging portion of their schedule having swept their first seven -- which includes current Ivy leader Brown and Yale -- that war up in Boston may not be so important after all. The main, unwavering objective is naturally to secure a league championship in any way possible, but following last year's occasionally bumpy road, wouldn't it be nice to see the Quakers coast to the finish line? It's very possible. It all comes down to winning at home, and as aged as it might be, the Palestra remains the perfect venue for Penn to accomplish just that.

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