With all defference to your memory, I’m guessing that something else also happened to the car overloaded with teenagers goofing around - not just a movement of the gear selector.
What year was this? I had read that most (if not all) cars since the early 80’s were made with a safety feature that if you could even get the thing in park while moving over 10 MPH (and that was a difficulty in itself because the pin wouldn’t settle into the Park position while it was spinning), that it would just sling the pin back out and it would be idle in neutral.