Josh Ouellette
By Josh Ouellette
I had the privilege to see the most amazing game of the season so far on Friday night. A game that has been rivaled only by the CIF Championship game between Monrovia and San Dimas last year. I may yet be a young writer but there is one thing I do know. I know football. I love football. I have loved football all my life, just ask anybody who has met me and spent a minute around me.
Lately I had been getting burned out, just slightly, enough to miss a Monday Night Football game here and there. Enough to only look up the score of the USC games I love so much. I felt myself floundering in a life where football wasn’t the most important thing. This was a new feeling to me. A feeling I didn’t like. I just couldn’t find a way out of.
Last night I found the light. I crawled out of the lackluster hole I had been in. Last night I fell in love with football all over again.
The game started just like any other. With both teams moving the ball within the 20’s pretty well trying to find their rhythm for most of the first quarter, with a few oddities. Chris Cornell of Maranatha went down. The leader of their defense and a pounding force on the offensive back field. Along with Cornell the Minutemen’s other running back, the dash to their ground game, Omar Younger went out of the game shortly after in the early minutes of the second quarter when he literally took a brain jarring hit to the head. A hit so hard that his helmet went flying off.
But the most gruesome injury of the night Valley Christian was to wide receiver Austin Batiste who broke his wrist in two places and was taken to the hospital and was under going surgery while the game was being played.
Though to have three crucial players to go down early in the game is weird. The game never stopped its course.
The game seemed to have its own destiny.
Maranatha would drive down the field and score. Then the Crusaders would have a big play to just barely take the lead. This back and forth match went on for the whole contest including the overtime.
That’s not what astounded me though. What astounded me was the pure desire of all the players to finish. To finish what they started. Not only to just finish, but to finish with the win.
The two quarterbacks had the resounding will for the victory. Maranatha’s Andrew Elfers had a part in every play in which his team scored, except the safety. He passed for over 580 yards and six touchdowns, while still leading his team on the ground with 70 yards and two touchdowns. VC’s Ryan Fronke was able to over come the adversity of throwing five interceptions to match Elfers with six touchdowns in the air, and he even rushed in for one too.
Valley Christian offensive linemen Steven Bivens never gave up. Even after he went down with a sprained ankle. He took his mandatory play off and then he was back in. He refused to let anyone by him. Maranatha defenders were his enemies and he vanquished them all, dropping players left and right, including on the last play. His block helped Fronke avoid the sack before he pitched it back to Trevor Rodriguez on the fateful broken play.
Trent Washington gave everything he had for the Minutemen. On defense and offense he was able to move the opposing linemen. At the end of the game he could barely get up after the play. He was dead tired. But on every play in the overtime period he went at the Crusaders like it was the last play he would ever be a part of.
Those are only four individuals of the 80 plus players on the field, who fought, clawed, pushed, and pulled on every play they were a part of.
I wish I could talk about everybody. I wish I could remember every play. I wish I could go back in the moment the night was and dwell in it forever. I was blessed enough to walk on the same sidelines of the warriors on the field of that fateful Friday night.
I was blessed to stand outside of the prayer huddle at the end of the game as Maranatha head coach Joel Murphy prayed with players who just finished the game in which any other two schools would hate each other forever after.
I was blessed that night for being able to see a game I will never forget. A game that everyone in attendance will always hold in reverence as the greatest game ever played.
Thank you to all the Valley Christian and Maranatha players for giving me back the love of football I was starting to lose. For this I am blessed.
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