Dances, hugs and high-fives were seen all over the Carrier Dome Saturday night, from the players on the field to the thousands of fans donning blue, green and white in the stands.
They were all celebrating an occasion decades in the making – a Section III football championship for Cicero-North Syracuse.
“It feels good to finally bring it home to C-NS,” said senior lineman Lorenzo Thompson.
Beyond the impressive numbers, what the Northstars’ 56-21 victory over Baldwinsville in the Class AA sectional final provided was deliverance from all the disappointment felt through the years with C-NS teams that had lofty expectations, yet could never meet them.
“We were playing for every C-NS player that came before us,” said junior quarterback Conner Hayes. “This was for them.”
Head coach David Kline said the win was also a tribute to the Cicero and North Syracuse communities that supported the Northstars in the past and, on this night, turned out in droves to the Dome to witness the program’s proudest moment so far.
So much of it centered around Hayes, who saved his best performance for B’ville, throwing five touchdown passes and running for two others as C-NS built a 28-0 first-half lead and then pulled away again when B’ville threatened to make it interesting.
“Connor was lights-out,” said Kline. “He’s a phenomenal athlete who can make plays.”
Hayes started making plays after Nate Geloff’s interception on the Bees’ first possession. A 25-yard run on third-down-and-eight that broke several tackles led to a nine-yard scoring pass to Peyton Watts.
More would follow in the first half, from a pump fake and a 24-yard TD pass to a wide-open Lukas Merluzzi to a screen pass to Erik Pride that the dynamic senior tailback turned into a 75-yard dash to the end zone.
By the time Hayes dashed 10 yards for his second rushing TD, C-NS had a 28-0 lead, and appeared safe. But late in the first half, B’ville fought its way back.
Ben Dwyer finished off one scoring drive with a seven-yard run. Then, on the last play of the half, Dwyer, from the C-NS 39, threw a lateral to Austin Lehman, who heaved it downfield to Gabe Horan and saw Horan fight his way past the goal line as time ran out.
Instead of a comfortable margin, C-NS only led 28-14 at the break, but Kline said his team did not worry.
“We just needed to stay the course, do what we had to and we would be fine,” he said.
And that meant watching Hayes take full advantage of the Bees’ defensive attention toward Pride, who had burned B’ville for 296 rushing yards and four touchdowns in C-NS’s 67-31 win at Bragman Stadium a month earlier.
No play meant more than what happened in the opening minute of the third quarter. Facing third-and-22 at his own 27, Hayes was blitzed and wheeled back to his own five-yard line before scrambling to the left sideline and throwing deep, finding Geloff behind the Bees’ coverage at midfield as Geloff ran the rest of the way for the touchdown.
Though B’ville cut the margin to 35-21 a few minutes later, it would not score again, and Hayes was far from done, with a 41-yard completion to pride setting up a 45-yard scoring pass to Shy’rel Broadwater.
When Hayes, taking a hard hit early in the fourth quarter, found Merluzzi in the end zone from 34 yards out early in the fourth quarter, it all but sealed C-NS’s long-awaited championship moment.
It gave Kline a chance to utter his three favorite words at this time of year – “Practice on Monday”, before entering the state tournament next Saturday at Union-Endicott with the Class AA regional final against Section IV champion Elmira, which kicks off at 7 p.m. The winner goes to the state semifinal on Nov. 18 against Rochester Aquinas or Lancaster.
