You can breathe now, folks.

Penn State football went up to 2-0 after beating Temple 27-9 on Saturday despite a turbulent first half. The opening 30 minutes of Matt Campbell’s second game featured a rare Ryan Barker missed field goal, a dropped touchdown from Chase Sowell, a bad miss from Rocco Becht to Andrew Rappleyea on 4th-and-goal, and a 47-yard rush by former Penn State signal caller Jaxon Smolik.

It was all very reminiscent of the Nittany Lions’ season-derailing loss to UCLA last October.

Until it wasn’t.

Campbell’s squad honed it in with a 10-play, 83-yard touchdown drive in the final two minutes of the first half that set up a 27-0 unanswered Nittany Lion run well into the fourth quarter. Penn State scored on each of its final five drives until it milked the clock out in the contest’s final 120 ticks of the clock.

“I felt like nobody flinched, nobody wavered. There was no complaining,” Campbell said postgame. “I think some of that can easily happen, but the reality is all three phases kind of faltered their own way … The thing that I really appreciate is who responded.”

The Nittany Lions had a number of players on both sides of the ball who stepped up and did what needed to be done to distance them from the Owls. Becht made tight throws under pressure, Tony Rojas recorded Penn State’s only takeaway, and Audavion Collins and Zion Tracy made sure Temple couldn’t fly anything past the secondary.

But what really set Penn State apart was Becht’s connection with two of his former Iowa State buddies, Sowell and Benjamin Brahmer.

Becht and Brahmer linked up for the 23-yard score that would knock the game in Penn State’s favor at the end of the first half. Brahmer split up the seam between Temple’s two high safeties for a walk-in score.

Brahmer didn’t stop there. He and Becht connected again on a 23-yard pass in the fourth quarter. The senior tight end waltzed into the end zone as he and the Nittany Lions tagged on their final points of the day.

“Me and Rocco [Becht] were just on the same page, and I have kudos to [Taylor] Mouse[r] on the other one, because he gave me a little tip literally right before the game, and they [Temple] bit on it, so it worked out,” Brahmer said postgame.

Penn State seemed like it was playing on autopilot after the first quarter in its season opener against Marshall. The Nittany Lions went up early and never looked back, piling it on the Thundering Herd until starters were pulled in the third quarter.

It was a little gritter against Temple, though. Penn State had to fight essentially until the very last drive. But Brahmer stepping up and essentially taking over the game through he and Becht’s connection opened the game up for Penn State after the constricting first half played by the Owls.

“Winning the middle eight was huge. Just continuing to set the tone, just keeping our heads down, was the biggest thing,” Brahmer said. “Not just folding just because we’re going through adversity, just continuing to fight through it.”

The “middle eight” Brahmer referred to means the last four minutes of the first half and the opening four minutes of the second half. Campbell and the coaching staff have instilled in the team that those are the most important eight minutes of the game, and that urgency showed against the Owls.

While Brahmer’s touchdown brought Penn State back into the game with newfound clarity going into halftime, Sowell’s second-quarter missed touchdown was part of the Nittany Lions’ initial funkiness. It was an impressive play by Temple cornerback Adrian Laing, who caught up to Sowell after getting burned on the route. It went down in the stats as a pass breakup, not a drop.

Nevertheless, Sowell took full accountability for it and acknowledged that the missed shot launched the Nittany Lions into adversity they didn’t need to be in, despite the fact that they tied the game up with a field goal on that drive.

“I was talking about the minor details, starting with me. I was just so hyped for the game that I didn’t go back to my process. And then after that drop, I had to go back to my process, calm myself down, and then that’s when things started settling down,” Sowell said.

Sowell eventually redeemed the drop with Penn State’s second touchdown of the day, and the one that really set the Nittany Lions apart with a fast second-half start. Sowell caught a left-hand screen pass from Becht and scored from 16 yards out after being personally escorted by Malachi Goodman, Trevor Buhr, Brett Eskildsen, and Andrew Rappleyea.

“Literally, I looked to Brett [Eskildsen] and I asked, ‘Ay, you got me?'” Sowell said. “He told me, he said, ‘You know I got you.’ Things like that, it means a lot … You got guys like Andrew [Rappleyea] and then the rest of the linemen coming out there. All I had to was let them develop, get their blocks, and then just did it … It means a lot to have those guys out there blocking for me, and that just definitely means that I would do the same for them.”

Penn State has a number of issues it needs to address heading into Week 3. The run game sputtered once more; the Nittany Lions went 2-for-4 in the red zone, and Penn State only converted 50% of its third downs.

Nobody expected Penn State to come out the way it did, and it seems like the players didn’t either. But the Nittany Lions used connections built at Iowa State to continue its perfect start under Matt Campbell. It was the Koby Howard show a week ago, but former Cyclones got the Nittany Lions into the end zone and into the win column against the Owls.

Temple proved a fiercer opponent than the squad anticipated, but the adversity and leadership out of it will only help Penn State grow.