Sometimes things are not as they seem.

For Penn State's men's track and field team, it seemed as if it had lost the four-team Army Invitational meet at West Point, N.Y., to host Army. Penn State apparently had 198 points, while Army had 199.5.

At the conclusion of the meet, one of Penn State's assistant coaches Andrew Hardyk realized that something was wrong with the scoring. After recalculating the score, it was realized that Army's scorer had unintentionally scored all of Army's athletes, regardless of their position, and even added points for its 5,000-meters runners, which was a non-scoring event.

The final score was Penn State 198, Army 193.5, while Manhattan College was still in third place with 131.5 points.

The top two athletes in the different events have their scores count toward the final team total. What the scorer did was count all of the players that competed for Army, which in some cases was four.

"I thought it was really exciting, because everyone was down, thinking that we lost the meet," Penn State men's track and field coach Harry Groves said. "I went on the bus and told the team that the score had been changed and that we won."

The Nittany Lions were relatively happy with their performance, as they were running on a flat track, which normally results in slower times.

Despite the slower surface, there were some good performances at the meet.

On the track side, first-place finishes for the Lions came from Ernie Terrell in the 400-meters in a time of 49.86 seconds. Juniors Jaret Campisi and Chris Foster also finished first in the 200-meters and 3,000-meters with a time of 22.14 seconds and 8:40.27, respectively. Freshman Steve Morgan grabbed first place in the 500 meters (1:06.60).

Groves was also impressed with sophomore Alex Langan, who finished second in the 60-meters with a time of 7.03 seconds.

Groves called Langan's performance "the upset of the centur,." but he was also impressed with sophomore Matt Lincoln's second-place finish in the mile.

"The top performance in the meet was in the mile, which we lost," Groves said referring to Lincoln's performance.

On the field side, Penn State also had success as sophomore Dan Miller won the shot-put with a toss of 51-8 Ã} feet.

The Lions were impressed with the competition, especially Army because of its depth and its high fitness levels, which made it a tough team.

"Competitively, it was a great meet," Groves said. He also added that Army was a Big Ten-caliber opponent.