The Legend of Engine #13

While digging into the legend that is rapidly becoming the Lehigh/Colgate Rivalry, I was talking with 13 (who runs The 13 Yard Line, Colgate's blog), who wanted to start "Blog Bowl I". It's a cup for the annual winner of the Lehigh/Colgate rivalry, and I agreed with him that it was a great idea! However, the only thing that was missing was the historical link; something to bond the schools on this Halloween weekend forever.

After doing a little digging in the archives, I was able to find the following document, just recently unearthed in an old dusty attic somewhere in Hellertown, and transcribed onto the internet by a little-known website called myfootballatticlegends.com. (Don't bother looking for it - just recently it's been taken down to make way for a new website about superhighways.)

Here's an excerpt of this rare, rare document:

"On a cold November day in 1922, Engine #13 of the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western RR arrived in Binghamton with a 2-2-1 Lehigh team ready to play a 3-2 Colgate team in the first-ever meeting with the two schools. Colgate students saw that as a sign that their Indians would be able to handle Lehigh's Engineers with no problem - 13 is Colgate's lucky number, as Colgate was founded by '13 Men with 13 dollars and 13 prayers'. Colgate did indeed demolish Lehigh in their first-ever meeting, 37-6, and there's many a Colgate fan at the time who said that it was the good fortune of Lehigh coming in on Engine #13 that gave Colgate the victory.

"Legend has it after Lehigh boarded the train to return to Bethlehem after their sound defeat, Engine #13 broke down pulling out of the station in its last-ever trip, causing the Engineers to stay in Binghamton in a fierce snowstorm an extra day before catching the next train home. Lehigh coach "Tom" Keady was rumored to have said that the experience on Engine #13 rattled the players so much that they lost to Bucknell and to hated Lafayette to close the year, not scoring a single point in both games.

As a result of this experience, Lehigh didn't play Colgate again until much later, in 1960. Coach "Bill" Leckonby is rumored to have insisted on taking a bus up to Hamilton to play Colgate, not wanting to repeat the cursed experience of riding the train up to Binghamton once again.

"Sometimes, in late October, folks living along the old DL&W line have heard strange noises along the tracks. Rumor has it that it's old "Engine #13", running up the tracks on its final journey to Colgate - or is it finally making its return from Hamilton, finally with a Lehigh win?

Thus, a rivalry, and the "Engine 13 Cup", is born. Should Lehigh win, my blog will be festooned with a new cup symbolizing this new rivalry. Let's hope "Engine 13" will be returning to Lehigh this year with a Lehigh victory.

P.S. Any resemblance of these characters to actual persons or events is purely coincidental! (Also, any resemblance of this "Engine 13 Cup" to England's "FA Cup Trophy" is purely coincidental too, by the way.)

How The Ivy League Is Able To Break the NCAA's Scholarship Limits and Still Consider Themselves FCS

By now you've seen the results. In 2018, the Ivy League has taken the FCS by storm. Perhaps it was Penn's 30-10 defeat of Lehigh a couple of weeks ago . Or maybe it was Princeton's 50-9 drubbing of another team that made the FCS Playoffs last year, Monmouth. Or maybe it was Yale's shockingly dominant 35-14 win over nationally-ranked Maine last weekend. The Ivy League has gone an astounding 12-4 so far in out-of-conference play, many of those wins coming against the Patriot League. But it's not just against the Patriot League where the Ivy League has excelled. Every Ivy League school has at least one out-of-conference victory, which is remarkable since it is only three games into their football season. The four losses - Rhode Island over Harvard, Holy Cross over Yale, Delaware over Cornell, and Cal Poly over Brown - were either close losses that could have gone either way or expected blowouts of teams picked to be at the bottom of the Ivy League....

Examining A Figure Skating Rivalry: Tonya and Nancy

It must be very hard for a millennial to understand the fuss around the Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding figure skating scandal in the run-up to the 1994 Olympics. If you're of a certain age, though - whether you're a figure skating fan or not, and I am decidedly no fan of figure skating - the Shakespearean story of Harding and Kerrigan still engages, and still grabs peoples' attention, twenty years later. Why, though? Why, twenty years later, in a sport I care little, does the story still grab me? Why did I spend time out of my life watching dueling NBC and ESPN documentaries on the subject, and Google multiple stories about Jeff Gilooly , idiot "bodyguards", and the whole sordid affair? I think it's because the story, even twenty years later, is like opium. The addictive story, even now, has everything. Everything. The woman that fought for everything, perhaps crossing over to the dark side to get her chance at Olypic Gold, vs. the woman who...

#TheRivalry Flashback: November 21st, 1987: Lehigh 17, Lafayette 10

Since becoming an undergrad at Lehigh back in the late 1980s, I first heard about the historic nature of the football team and "The Rivalry" through the stories that fellow students would share. I did not attend the final meeting between Lehigh and Lafayette at Taylor Stadium, which was the final time a football game would be played there. Those that did attend said that was that it was cold. "I remember it being one of the coldest games ever," Mark Redmann recollected, "with strong Northwesterly winds and the temperature hovering around 20. By the end of the game, the stands were half empty because most of the fans just couldn't take the cold. "Fortunately, several of my fraternity brothers snuck in flasks to help fend off the chill."

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