That was us. You can see the filed route, and the actual route. We were flight-planned to go all the way up to Burlington, VT and then fly back, but we lost nearly an hour in ground delays.
So, New York TRACON, normally not the most flexible of control agencies, let us take a huge shortcut and loop directly back to EWR.
We were airborne for exactly 34 minutes, and pulled into the North Pole gate (decorated, etc. C104) within 2 minutes of our planned arrival time.