One Point, One Blocked Kick, And Penn State Survives Minneapolis

There are games you win with a haymaker and games you win by the width of a fingernail. Penn State left Huntington Bank Stadium on Saturday night having won by exactly one point, and the longer you sit with it, the more you understand that the whole evening hinged on a single play most of the crowd had already stopped watching.

Rewind to the chaos at the end of the first half. Minnesota had just thrown the building into a frenzy — Max Brosmer finding Jameson Geers for 21 yards and a touchdown with barely a minute left, the Gophers suddenly ahead and alive. Penn State answered with the kind of hurried, desperate drive that usually ends in a field goal or a sigh. Instead Drew Allar tucked it and ran it in himself from four yards out with 19 seconds on the clock. And then the night turned strange.

Ryan Barker's extra point — the most automatic play in football — got blocked. For half a second it looked like a gift handed back to Minnesota. But Penn State's Ethan Robinson scooped up the wreckage and carried it the other way for a defensive two-point conversion. Two points off a blocked kick. If you are scoring at home, that is the entire final margin, banked in the half's dying breath, in a sequence nobody could have drawn up.

The defense kept handing it back

All night, when Penn State needed a stop, a Nittany Lion put his hands on the football. In the second quarter, Dominic DeLuca jumped a Brosmer throw and returned it 29 yards to the Minnesota 23, snuffing out a drive and stealing the field. To open the fourth, Brosmer dropped back, lost nine yards and the ball both, and Zakee Wheatley fell on the fumble at the Minnesota 41. Twice the Gophers had something building; twice they walked off with nothing but the sick feeling of giving it away.

Between the takeaways, this was a heavyweight clinch. Omari Evans had given Penn State its first real jolt with a 45-yard touchdown catch from Allar, and Nicholas Singleton bullied in from 12 in the third to push the lead. But Minnesota would not go away. Dragan Kesich, automatic from anywhere, kept the Gophers within a single possession with kicks of 48, 42 and finally 26 yards. Tyler Warren did Tyler Warren things — 102 yards' worth of chain-moving catches — and still the margin stayed a coin's edge.

The cruelest part for Minnesota came at the very end. Penn State, nursing its one point, got the ball to the 3-yard line — close enough to taste a backbreaking touchdown — with 27 seconds left. The Gophers burned a timeout. The Nittany Lions never needed the score; they had the lead and the clock, and they simply let the air out of the building one kneel-down's worth at a time. The goal-line stand Minnesota wanted to make never came, because Penn State refused to hand it the chance.

One point. A blocked kick that bounced the right way, a couple of giveaways the Gophers will see in their sleep, and a finish that asked Minnesota to win it and never quite let them try. Penn State survived. On nights like this, surviving is the whole art.