No, it didn’t rain for the Cazenovia football team’s Class B regional final against Chenango Forks Saturday at Cicero-North Syracuse’s Bragman Stadium – except for the points that poured down from the opposition.
Set back by three first-half turnovers, two of which led to touchdowns, the Lakers fell to the state no. 1-ranked Blue Devils 35-13, ending up three wins short of repeating as state champions.
“We needed to play our ‘A’ game, and it ended up a ‘B’ game,” said Cazenovia head coach Jay Steinhorst. “They (Forks) do not make a lot of mistakes.”
A full decade had passed since Cazenovia and Forks last met, but unlike the rain-soaked 2006 regional final that ended 3-0 in the Blue Devils’ favor, the skies were clear and weather would not factor at all in the outcome.
Thus, the Lakers’ challenge was clear and simple – play at its highest level possible, avoid errors and hope that Forks, winner of the last three state Class C titles before moving up to Class B in 2016, did not display the form that allowed the Blue Devils to outscore its 10 opponents by a combined 388-78 margin this fall.
Almost none of these things happened.
Anthony Vecchiarelli’s first pass of the game got picked off by lineman Brandin Paulhamis on his team’s third play from scrimmage. L.J. Watson’s 25-yard run put Forks inside the 10, but the Lakers stopped Watson on a short pass at the one.
That reprieve proved temporary, though, for the next time the Blue Devils got the ball, Cody Bogue used a play-action fake to find a wide-open Dan Crowningshield in the secondary for a 44-yard scoring pass that put Forks up 7-0 late in the first quarter.
And it got worse when, blitzed, Vecchiarelli got intercepted again, this time by Ryan Ehrets, who returned it to the Lakers’ four, from where Watson scored two plays later to make it 14-0.
It took a 37-yard Vecchiarelli pass to Cody Thorp to give Cazenovia a scoring opportunity early in the second quarter. Yet it got squandered by a fumbled option pass and fourth-down incomplete pass.
Then, in a span of 32 seconds right before halftime, things got out of hand, entirely due to Watson’s skills on both the offensive and defensive sides of the ball.
Watson broke free with a 54-yard dash down the right sideline as the half wound down, setting up his second TD on a one-yard plunge with 1:10 left in the half, which followed another Cazenovia excursion into Forks territory that did not yield points.
Trying to do something in the time that remained in the half, Vecchiarelli instead threw deep and saw Watson pick it off at the Lakers’ 35, run down the right side, change direction to the middle of the field and break tackles as he returned to the end zone for his third TD of the game.
In a flash, Cazenovia’s deficiit had doubled, to 28-0, so it had no choice but to try an onside kick at the start of the second half. The Lakers recovered it at the 50, and then executed a fake punt 25-yard pass to Austin Enders to set up Cody Thorp’s one-yard TD run that broke up the Blue Devils shutout.
Even that spark got extinguished, though, when Forks answered with yet another scoring drive culminating in yet another play-action fake by Bogue that left Crowningshield wide-open in the end zone for a 17-yard scoring pass.
The Lakers would get one more TD in the last minute of the game on Vecchiarelli’s 43-yard TD pass to Will Huftalen, yet even that came after the Blue Devils burned more than six minutes of clock on a long possession to put it away.
Cazenovia managed to overcome its early-season inconsistency and the post-season injury to quarterback Matt Regan to snare yet another Section III Class B title. Steinhorst said it was a tribute to the way his veteran players adopted to the heightened expectations a 2015 state championship brought to the program.
“The pressure was pretty high,” said Steinhorst. “But they (the seniors) made it their own team, and had a pretty good year.”
