It was quite the celebration Saturday at Goodman Stadium in Bethlehem after Lehigh beat rival Lafayette 38-14 in the 160th edition of college football’s most-played rivalry.
The win completed a remarkable turnaround for Lehigh, which finished the season 8-3 to capture the Patriot League championship, just one season after going 2-9.
So it was no surprise that students and fans would want to mark the occasion the way students and fans tend to when the football team vanquishes its chief rival: storming the field and tearing down the goalposts.
It took some time and effort, but the sea of fans was eventually able to get one of the goalposts to the ground.
THEY TRIED & TRIED
And eventually the fans got the goal post down.
— Keith Groller (@GrollerKeith)
The scene harkened back to the older days of the rivalry, when the toppling of the goalposts at the end of the game was an annual tradition. Back when wooden goalposts were common, it was a much easier task.
POSTGAME PARTY
You see some of the trophy presentation for on the video board, you see the goalpost carried out of the stadium, and, I guess, eventually dumped in the Lehigh River and you see retiring AD Joe Sterrett enjoying one last stroll in the end zone.
— Keith Groller (@GrollerKeith)
As metal goalposts became common, they were still switched out with wooden ones just for the Lehigh-Lafayette game to prevent injury. By the early 1990s, however, the practice of toppling the goalposts had been discouraged.
Back to this year’s postgame celebration, the festivities didn’t end at the stadium. A mob of fans carried it on a nearly 5-mile journey over the mountain and into the heart of South Side Bethlehem. The trek was captured in .
Their eventual destination: the Fahy Bridge, where students threw it into the Lehigh River below, as seen in p.
The moment the goalpost was tossed off the bridge was caught on video:
Video of the goalpost going over
— Lehigh Valley with Love (@LVwithLove)
Lehigh football pounds Lafayette; wins first Patriot League title since 2017
