In reality, the Section III Class AA football championship game, played between Liverpool and Henninger Sunday night at the Carrier Dome, was two games rolled into one outcome.
The first of these games involved the Warriors, playing in its first sectional final since 1998, showing its resilience by turning back the Black Knights with two big defensive stands, and even seizing a 7-6 lead.
Then came the second game – or more specifically, a top-to-bottom clinic authored by Henninger where it left Liverpool, and its long-held sectional championship dreams, far behind.
In all, the Black Knights accumulated 38 unanswered points in those last two periods, turning a tense, tight affair into a 44-7 decision and Henninger’s first sectional title in six years.
“I’m so proud of our guys,” said Liverpool head coach Dave Mancuso. “They battled for four quarters. But Henninger was better. They just wore us out.”
It didn’t help the Warriors that its top wide receiver and defensive back, Matt Sala, had injured his arm in the 7-0 sectional semifinal win over Baldwinsville and would miss this game.
Liverpool also had a disadvantage in terms of Dome experience. Not only had Henninger reached the sectional title game in 2013 (a 19-14 defeat to CBA), it had also played against (and beat) the Brothers in a rematch at the Dome in the Sept. 5 season opener.
Perhaps sensing the Warriors’ nerves, Henninger tried an onside kick to start the game, and while it didn’t work, it set a tone with Savon Smith’s hard hit on Jaydakis Scott in the backfield.
Following a bad punt, Black Knights quarterback Romero Collier raced 40 yards to set up his own seven-yard touchdown run 2:53 into the first quarter, though the conversion was missed.
Trailing 6-0, Liverpool offered a quick answer, thanks to Ricky Sisto throwing a pair of passes to Joe Scro, one of them covering 23 yards, before Scott took an option pitch and ran into the end zone from 16 yards out. A successful extra point gave the Warriors a 7-6 lead.
The rest of the half turned into a test of the Warriors’ patience and resilience. Twice, Henninger drove inside Liverpool’s 20-yard line. Both times, it got stopped, with Zack Khatib intercepting a Collier pass near the goal line to end one of the threats.
At the same time, though, the Black Knights’ defense used its speed off the ball to pressure Sisto and keep Scott from getting any kind of momentum after his TD run. Thus, the game went into the break with the Warriors still clinging to that 7-6 lead.
What followed, the moment the third quarter got underway, was not a poor effort on Liverpool’s part. It was just Henninger playing close to perfection in all phases of the game.
Collier, who did not have a single passing yard in the first half, started to find his targets on the Black Knights’ first drive of the third quarter. A 19-yard pass to K.J. White set up a 15-yard scoring pass to Collier’s favorite target, Keisan Scott, who dived to grab the ball in the end zone just before it hit the turf. White caught the two-point pass from Collier, and Henninger led for good.
As if his work under center wasn’t enough, Collier, after the Black Knights forced another Liverpool punt, returned that kick 41 yards for a TD, and added his own two-point run, which made it 22-7 less than a minute later.
All through the game, Henninger’s running attack had gained large chunks of yardage against the Warriors’ usually formidable defense. Devin Redden had 155 yards on 25 carries, while teammate Najee Everson had 12 carries for 81 yards.
It was Redden’s runs that helped set up another Collier scoring pass to Scott, this one covering 12 yards. More big gains led to Collier’s nifty 19-yard rollout pass to Scott for a third TD connection early in the fourth quarter, and Everson added one more touchdown on a three-yard run with 4:47 left.
Henninger moves on to face Corning in Saturday’s Class AA regional final at CIcero-North Syracuse’s Bragman Stadium.
Liverpool, meanwhile, still felt pride in what it had accomplished during its 9-1 season, the players going to the sideline and raising their helmets to the large crowd that had come to the Dome to both watch this game and celebrate the journey it took to get there.
“It was wonderful,” said Mancuso, adding that the taste of just getting to the sectional final will make him, his fellow coaches and his players all eager to come back here in 2015 and, perhaps, win it all.
