Penn State Stun No. 1 Northwestern 2-0, End 35-Game Big Ten Winning Streak

Some upsets announce themselves early. This one waited until the third quarter, then broke a streak that had stood for four years.

Penn State beat No. 1 Northwestern 2-0 in Happy Valley on Friday night, ending the Wildcats’ 35-game winning run in Big Ten regular-season play. Northwestern hadn’t lost a conference regular-season game since October 8, 2022. They hadn’t been shut out in a regular-season conference game since that same year, either. Penn State did both, in front of their own crowd, on the final night of the regular season.

It was scoreless at half-time, which tells you plenty about how good both defences have been all year. Then sophomore Cooper Cutchins broke it open in the third quarter, scoring off a penalty corner. Northwestern threw everything forward late, even pulling the goalkeeper, and Penn State made them pay: freshman Lilly Holmes converted another corner with no keeper to beat, her first goal, to seal it.

For Penn State, this is the good kind of history. It’s their first win over a No. 1 team since 2002. It comes after Iowa ended their eight-game winning streak with a 1-0 win last Sunday, so the response couldn’t have been much louder. And it locks them in as the No. 3 seed for next week’s Big Ten Tournament, where they get Iowa again in the quarter-finals on Wednesday.

Northwestern, for their part, are still the team to beat. They’d already wrapped up a share of the Big Ten regular-season title and the tournament’s No. 1 seed, and they arrived in Pennsylvania as two-time reigning national champions who started the season as the unanimous No. 1. A loss like this doesn’t change that. But it does change the mood around Columbus next week. The unbeatable tag is gone, and every team in the bracket just watched it happen.

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