Years from now, with all due respect to the Northern Huskies, Friday night’s 28-25 victory over Allegany will be remembered as the first Keyser football win in the beautiful new Alumni Stadium at Tornado Alley that opened two Fridays ago when Keyser defeated the Huskies, 34-0.
That’s just how the mind works. It’s how the selected and convenient memory of the sports fan dictates the thought process, particularly as time goes by.
So years from now, a dad is going to be sitting in Alumni Stadium, or whatever the corporate sponsor will be calling it years from now, and he’ll tell his son, who will be the same age as his dad was last Friday night, “Years ago I was here for the first game at this stadium. We drove 90 yards in the last five minutes. Mr. Kitrell (that would be current Keyser fullback Scott Kitrell) took ’er in in the final seconds and we beat Allegany, 30-28.”
Yes, we know the score was 28-25, but that’s another way the sports fan sometimes gets fooled by his own memory, because the memory has a way of taking a magnificent moment, storing it, and making it sweeter and sweeter with each passing year, and with each new passing of the legend.
Actually, Friday night’s inspired Keyser victory warrants the cherished memory for years to come on its own merit. Much to the chagrin of the Campers, it was an instant Tornado Classic, taking place in a magnificent new facility funded and built by the hands of the Keyser High School community.
It will be remembered as an all-time Keyser victory for years to come, coming on the heels of an all-time Keyser team. But actually, if the Golden Tornado mounts a serious roll and produces the kind of playoff season Tornado Town has grown accustomed to, the biggest win of the Keyser season will have been the 34-0 win over Northern last weekend.
We mentioned the Keyser team from a year ago that went undefeated in the regular season to win the Area championship, then sent about a hundred kids off to college to play football. Not to sweep fond memories under the rug, but that team was then; this team is now. That’s how it works in high school, and this team basically had to start from scratch against two teams — Wayne and Fort Hill — that look to be serious contenders in their respective states.
That’s why the second half of the Fort Hill game was important to Keyser, although Fort Hill folks will say it was because the Sentinels hadn’t played four quarters of football until Friday’s 41-14 shellacking of Martinsburg; and that’s why last week’s win over Northern was huge for Keyser. It was the first one, and the first step for this team to create its own identity. In its own house.
And speaking of Fort Hill, I’ve thought long and hard about this since the Sentinels took apart the Bulldogs, and I keep coming back to the same feeling I had as soon as I heard the final score on Friday: Yikes!
Let’s take a look at these Sentinels, who lost some pretty good folks as well from last year’s state-finalist team: They open at Surrattsville with a win, and though Surrattsville entered yesterday’s game at Douglass at 0-3, it’s not an easy thing to open the season in Prince George’s County, where the football has always been very good and very physical.
Then there is the 29-8 victory over Keyser, followed by the 22-12 win over Baltimore’s Mount St. Joseph and now the 41-14 over Martinsburg, the top-rated team in the state of West Virginia, and a program that had handled Fort Hill the last six times they met.
Please don’t feel the need to qualify this with, “It’s only the fourth week, but ...” Bottom line is, the Sentinels look to be a very good football team when you consider they have already handily beaten two of the three 4A schools they had to put on their schedule because the local conference they joined so this kind of thing wouldn’t happen bailed out on them to allow this kind of thing to happen.
No, of course the AMAC isn’t a football conference now. How could it be when member schools pick and choose who they will and won’t play? But having just re-read the May 21, 2006 Times-News story about the formation of the league, “One of the driving forces of the league was to get football into an area conference,” according to Maryland Hall of Fame coach Tom Woods, the first president of the AMAC. “The WMIL (Western Maryland Interscholastic League) doesn’t have football.”
Sorry, Coach Woods. Looks like you got hoodwinked, too. But back to Fort Hill.
The Fort Hill football coach, to paraphrase the umpire Ed Vargo, is supposed to be perfect his first day on the job, then show constant improvement. So naturally, most Fort Hill fans expected the Sentinels to be 5-0 after four games.
I think fans not quite as close to the situation believed the Sentinels would have been just fine, thank you, if they came out of the first four at 3-1.
From the looks of things, this Fort Hill team seems to be a perfect fit for the Fort Hill fan base, given the who and the how of the early portion of their season. These Sentinels, you see, seem intent on being quite a bit more than just fine, thank you.
Mike Burke is sports editor of the Cumberland Times-News. Contact Mike Burke at mburke@times-news.com.
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