Analy's football team is beginning to earn its cookies

SEBASTOPOL

OK, sure, if Analy loses the rest of its football games this year and doesn’t score even a point, then, yes, last Friday will have been wasted. That’s how significant last Friday was, how unlikely it will fade to oblivion and if a victory has an aroma, then it’s springtime in the Rockies for Analy for the next three months. It was that powerful a moment.

“I woke up the next morning,” said running back Joe Maloney, “and it was still like a miracle.”

A miracle is a disbelieving, a defiance of the known. Or, to put it in more layman’s terms — Where the heck did that come from? So where the heck did this come from: As time expired Analy stopped Terra Linda from scoring from the 18-inch line to win the game? Analy did not have the pedigree for the moment, having gone 2-8 in 2007.

We’ll start at the beginning. That would be January. The incoming new coach, Dan Bourdon, walked the campus halls, searching for a few good young men. No one was more eager to leave the past in the past. To say Analy struggled in 2007 would be a kind assessment.

“Anybody who had an athletic build,” said Bourdon, a former Analy quarterback himself, “I asked them why they didn’t play football. I got a wide range of answers. Some weren’t into it.”

Some were. Ben and Jack Doran, the fiery basketball twins, came out. Bourdon didn’t lay the heavy sales pitch but Analy kids aren’t rock heads. They could see what was going on. The new football coaching staff was so young, did they have driver’s licenses or student identification cards?

The average age of the five-man coaching staff is 24.8 years. Niko Miller, the offensive line coach, is 20. Bourdon, offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach, is 27. The old man is defensive coordinator Toby Carpenter at 30. D.J. Sexton, defensive backs and wide receivers, is 22. Robert Brasil, 25, handles the defensive linemen and the running backs.

So this was the scene before last Friday. Analy has seven players who never played football before. Bourdon has never coached varsity, just two years as a junior varsity head coach. And it didn’t take much for the team to remember why it went 2-8 last season.

“We had players last year but our problem was psychological,” said senior defensive end Zac Illingworth. “Every time we got behind we lost it.”

Down 22-8 in the fourth quarter to Terra Linda at Karlson Field — “after trailing we never came back last year” said Maloney — Analy scored 22 unanswered points. But in the space of the last five seconds of the game Analy threatened to undo all it had done. It had committed two penalties that brought the ball within 18 inches of the Tigers’ end zone. Maloney thought for a moment it was 2007 all over again but then banished the thought from his mind.

“This game felt different,” Maloney said. Meaning, no one was feeling sorry for himself.

Especially Illingworth. He is 6-foot-9, 230 pounds, has the reach of a condor but had been chewed out repeatedly by Bourdon during the game for not staying put at left defensive end, protecting the outside. Terra Linda quarterback Chris Migdal remembered it, too. Illingworth had bit on several of Migdal’s fakes. For the first time in the game ... “I stayed where I was,” Illingworth said. And Migdal came to him, and he was stopped short of the goal line like he was gift-wrapped.

“It was one of the most exciting moments of my athletic career,” Illingworth said. “To be the star of the moment, that was special.”

How many other plays has Illingworth made like that?

“None,” he said. And then, almost as an afterthought, Illingworth added, “This was a chance to prove something to ourselves, to make something of ourselves.”

That’s the high-value grand-scheme spin to be put on the victory. Here’s a more intimate, personal interpretation: The chocolate chip cookies went down easy Monday.

Linda Helton teaches sixth grade at Hillcrest Middle School but has been the team statistician for 23 years. Before each season every Tiger player makes a 10-cookie bet with her. For Maloney it’s 200 all-purpose yards. For Illingworth it is making two tackles or one sack or two blocked passes. Make the numbers and a player gets 10 homemade cookies.

“Sometimes last year, when we lost,” said Maloney, who had 211 all-purpose yards, “it didn’t feel like you deserved the cookies.”

The cookies, even in a loss, were Helton’s way of giving the players something to look forward to the next week. This time Helton could have handed the players 10 rocks in a bag and they would have been delighted.

“I made nine dozen Sunday morning,” Helton said.

Sometimes a single victory feels bigger than one. Sometimes 10 cookies feel more like a hundred. And sometimes the exhilaration rush lasts for more than a moment or a day. Sometimes, when the achievement is just right, it can last for months.

You can reach Staff Columnist Bob Padecky at 521-5490 or at bob.padecky@pressdemocrat.com.