CUMBERLAND — The manner in which Friday night’s Dunbar-Fort Hill football game ended at Greenway Avenue Stadium has the Cumberland area buzzing. It apparently has the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area chirping as well.

To recount, with 4:04 left in the third quarter, the Crimson Tide of Washington, looking for its first win of the season after three losses, was leading Fort Hill, 14-8, when Dunbar head coach Craig Jefferies directed his team to leave the field to return home to Washington, with Fort Hill likely to receive a forfeit victory.

At the time, the Sentinels were driving the ball and being aided by a series of penalties assessed to Dunbar. At one point, after Coach Jefferies removed a player from the field, the player threw his helmet down on the sideline, which drew an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty. Dunbar had four unsportsmanlike penalties for the game, three in the third quarter, was flagged for a late hit on the next play, with Jefferies being penalized for arguing that foul.

Soon after leaving Greenway, Jefferies informed the Washington Post he pulled his team off the field because Crimson Tide players were being subjected to repeated racial epithets.

“They were trying to upset us, calling my guys the N-word,” Jefferies is quoted as saying in Saturday’s Washington Post. “I had one guy in tears. I had to take him off the field.”

Jefferies also told the Post that as he walked with his team to the locker room he was verbally accosted with slurs. He said the team was forced to stay in the locker room for 30 minutes while police established a secure path for the team to board its buses.

No arrests were made by Cumberland Police.

Jefferies plans to send a videotape of the game to officials. Fort Hill Principal Steve Lewis plans to do some investigating of his own.

Lewis was out of town for the weekend, but on Saturday in a return telephone call to the Times-News he said, “I got a call when all of this happened in the third quarter. I have talked to (Fort Hill football coach Todd Appel), we have talked to the team. I have asked the game officials to send their game reports to me. I have asked the police and administrators who were at the game to send me written reports. I have no written details but from what I am told the officials were in control of the football game. I can’t believe they thought anything like that was going on or they would have stopped the game and gone to administrators for help to control it.

“We will investigate everything and try to get to the bottom of it.”

Appel, in his first season as Fort Hill head coach, in making his only comment on the abrupt ending of the game said late Friday night, “I trust my kids.”

Lewis, on the other hand, wonders what the Crimson Tide’s emotional state might have been entering the game, based on a phone call he received Saturday morning.

“The Ponderosa (Steakhouse in LaVale) called us and wanted to know who to send the bill to for the bathroom that was damaged before the game when Dunbar was having their pregame meal there,” Lewis said. “So maybe that was their state of emotion before the game even started, I don’t know.”

Amanda Coffman, manager of the Ponderosa, confirmed to the Times-News that a urinal in a restaurant bathroom was damaged, saying, “It appears the kids were standing on the urinal and it came off the wall.”

Coffman also reported officials at Dunbar told Ponderosa management the school would take care of the matter of repairing the damage. She also said that while the Dunbar players were in the restaurant during their meal, “they were very nice.”

Based on the verbal reports he has received, Lewis believes the Dunbar players might have been feeling frustration, having scored a 61-yard touchdown on the game’s first offensive play, yet still finding themselves leading by six points with Fort Hill on a sustained offensive drive, which was being aided by penalties.

“Sure,” Lewis said, “I think this could have stemmed from frustration. Our coaches scouted Dunbar before the game and they were very impressed with them. They are a football team with a lot of talented players and a lot of great players, and I think our team had gained control of the tempo of the game. We’re a ball-control team, that’s how we play, and I’m thinking Dunbar might have grown frustrated the ball wasn’t in their hands.”

Lewis said he will have an open mind when he begins gathering information on Monday, but said the Fort Hill coaching staff and players have his trust as well.

“I know the personality of the Fort Hill coaches and of our kids,” he said. “I don’t know Coach Jefferies, but I do know sometimes when you do what you think is the right thing it gets the wrong reaction. I won’t speculate on why he did what he did, but I wouldn’t recommend it.”

Which brought Lewis back to a chief bone of contention of his: local scheduling. Having lost games with area teams Frankfort and Hampshire this season, the Sentinels have games scheduled with out-of-town schools Baltimore City College, Dunbar, Cambridge-South Dorchester, Jefferson and Frederick Douglass.

Fort Hill then had to find another game when it lost Southern-Garrett due to its own scheduling error. Thus, the Sentinels will play Cambridge-South Dorchester Friday at 2 p.m. at Greenway Avenue Stadium and will then host McKinley Tech of Washington Oct. 3.

“I’ve harped on this before, but we need to play local football,” Lewis said. “When you play teams from out of the area that you don’t really know, it’s good in some situations and bad in others. And, yes, everybody knows we’re the only ones who have to go out of the area for many of our games.

“When we stay local, we all know each other, our programs and our personalities. We know what we’re getting. We get along with each other and like each other, and we play great football. We need to play local football.”

Contact Mike Burke at mburke@times-news.com.