Excitement, spirit and intensity will be on display next Friday night at Alibrandi Stadium, but the football showdown between Fayetteville-Manlius and Christian Brothers Academy goes beyond spectacle.

The schools have rarely met in the regular season since CBA moved into Class AA in the early 2000s. But they have several Section III playoff encounters on the ledger, including last year’s opening-round game and the sectional finals in 2004 and ’05, each won of them won by the Brothers.

Now, though, the match-up carries regular-season weight, with F-M and CBA tied for first place in the Class AA-1 division with equal 2-0 league records in the wake of lopsided road wins Friday by both sides against Syracuse city foes – the Hornets hammering Henninger 59-39, the Brothers putting away Corcoran 34-16.

In order to get here, F-M has accumulated 121 points in its two league games. After outscoring Rome Free Academy 62-41 on Sept. 16, the Hornets did much the same thing at Sunnycrest Field with Henninger a week later as, once again, Eric Coley took center stage.

Five times in this game, Coley found the end zone, giving him 12 touchdowns over the course of two weeks. He had more than 100 yards by the end of the first quarter thanks to scoring runs of 48 and 62 yards.

F-M wasn’t a one-man show, though, as Henry Josephson went deep to find Tyler Powell on a 79-yard scoring pass and Brody Phelan scored from 32 yards out, all of it done by the end of the first quarter as the Hornets roared ahead of Henninger 26-0.

Here, though, F-M’s defensive problems resurfaced. Over the course of the next two periods, the Black Knights unloaded with Emetri Allen, who four times found the end zone in that stretch, including two 48-yard plays – one a run, the other a pass from Johnny Vigiliotti.

What saved the Hornets was that it kept matching all of this firepower. Coley again broke loose on scoring runs of 38 and 72 yards, and tacked on a 56-yard TD dash in the late going after Josephson scored from one yard out and threw a 12-yard TD pass to Ben Welling.

As F-M held on, it knew that its defense would have to prove a lot in a week, or get victimized by state Class AA no. 10-ranked CBA and its innate ability to make big plays anywhere on the field  -as it demonstrated again at Corcoran.

In fact, it took less than 20 seconds for the Brothers to get out in front. Stevie Scott took the opening kickoff at his own 10-yard line and, getting tremendous blocks, didn’t stop until he was in the end zone 90 yards later, giving CBA a lead it would not relinquish.

All through the first half, the theme was the same. Any time Corcoran tried to establish something, the Brothers hurt them with a big play.

Devonte Flagg’s 11-yard scoring run and Jaquail Everson’s two-point play briefly gave the Cougars an 8-7 lead, but it was erased when SirVocea Dennis, from the Corcoran 40, threw deep and found Noah Jordan-Williams for the TD.

During the second quarter, Dennis again went long, from his own 21, and found DeAndre Dowell for a 79-yard scoring strike. Scott then returned to go 40 yards for his second TD of the night, and Mike Matheson went four-for-four in extra points in the first half.

Comfortably ahead, 28-6, at halftime, CBA could not quite maintain that torrid pace in the second half, but still found the end zone when Dennis sneaked in from one yard out. Flagg’s one-yard TD plunge in the fourth quarter proved too late.