Thrill, agony, emptiness walked hand in hand

Mike Burke

Unfortunately for the Fort Hill Sentinels, the power on the concrete side of Greenway Avenue Stadium was restored sometime Friday night in the second quarter of a football game, with a 14-0 lead, they were on the brink of putting in their back pockets, but would soon be on their way to losing, 35-14.

The restoration of power, of course, meant the mere sounds of the football game being played by two ancient rivals, Fort Hill and Allegany, flowing naturally to our ears from the field of play would now be jammed by public interference — public address interference, that is, as the Fort Hill public address announcer, soon after power had been restored, felt compelled to remind the 8,000 or so fans in attendance who had been able to follow the progress of the game very nicely, thanks to that enormous new scoreboard at the end of the field, that, oh, by the way, the score of the game was Fort Hill 14, Allegany nothing.

Will some high school public address announcers never learn? Their lot in life is to be heard; not listened to. Lucky for the Allegany Campers their fans heard; they listened, and they reacted. For from that moment on, that large gathering situated on the visitors side of the field had been clapped out of a trance and was transformed into an active, attentive and on-edge football crowd. The Allegany band never stopped playing, the cheerleaders never stopped leading cheers, and the crowd remained loud and supportive on each play. And when Dustin Wharton streamed 48 yards through the Fort Hill secondary untouched on a screen pass that was meant to set up a field goal but, in fact, scored a touchdown with just three seconds left in the half, the entire tone, and the entire course of the evening had been changed.

The Campers and their fans had gone from being ready and seemingly willing to take the whipping all of the so-called experts said Fort Hill would put on them, to putting the game within reach with the most unlikely screen pass result they’ve ever had, to virtually putting the game on lockdown, even though they were still trailing 14-7, when they stopped a Fort Hill drive on the Sentinels’ first second-half possession.

In some regards, it might have been fitting that Friday night’s game was the last game played before the concrete stands that have stood on the Greenway Avenue side of the field since 1936 when the stadium was built. Fitting, perhaps, because in the 45 seasons I’ve been going to the stadium, I can’t recall a game taking the absolute and immediate turn that Friday night’s game took. The only thing I could remotely compare it to was the 1998 Fradiska game because of the complete and utter weirdness that permeated Greenway on that day.

From the beginning of Friday’s second half, Fort Hill seemed to have lost its body language, going from the near-dominant team on the field to an almost submissive one once its first offensive possession of the second half had been stopped. The Campers, on the other hand, made some effective adjustments offensively and seemed to pick up extra bounce with each new step. Even in the fourth quarter when Allegany fumbled the ball on the Fort Hill one, the Campers’ body language expressed their getting the ball right back and going in for the tying touchdown was inevitable. And that’s just what happened as a Fort Hill punt from the end zone was returned 40 yards by that Wharton fellow with 9:17 left in the game.

It’s crazy. The game was far from being settled, yet many of us had a powerful, and correct, notion that Allegany was going to win.

And so the state playoff trail of success of Allegany grows longer, as do the state-playoff frustrations of Fort Hill. Allegany moves on to play at top-seeded Joppatowne Friday night in the Maryland 1A semifinals. Fort Hill puts yet another undefeated regular season in the books, yet comes to the end of yet another agonizing postseason epilogue.

Everybody knew it was bound to happen, that the teams would eventually split two games in the same season under the current format. Conventional wisdom said it would not be this year as the Sentinels seemingly moved to an invincible gait. Yet the more you found yourself pondering the Campers you understood their backs are just so good that if they ever put together a game with no lost fumbles they would be darn near impossible to stop. And for this Allegany team, just one lost fumble, even taking place at the lip of the goal line, is about as close to no lost fumbles as you’re going to get.

It was a glorious night for Allegany; a torturous one for Fort Hill; and a surreal one for the community and the immediate neighborhood of Johnson Heights and Fort Hill as on the same day and night two of its three remaining pillars, Memorial Hospital and the concrete structure of Greenway Avenue Stadium, closed for business.

Aside from the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat that goes hand-in-hand with such a night, aside from the human drama of athletic competition that took place, it was simply a very strange and unsettling evening in what has always been such a strong and settled neighborhood.

Mike Burke is sports editor of the Cumberland Times-News sports editor. Contact Mike Burke at mburke@times-news.com.