While it was a big win for the Fayetteville-Manlius football team, an even bigger opportunity looms ahead.

The Hornets’ hard-fought 31-28 victory over Utica Proctor on Friday night means that F-M are 3-0 heading into next weekend’s showdown with 3-0, defending Section III Class AA champion Cicero-North Syracuse.

“Now is the perfect time to play a big-time game,” said Hornets head coach Paul Muench, already anticipating the big-time atmosphere the battle with C-NS will bring.

More importantly to F-M, it goes into that game at full strength. Mitchell Seabury, a big-play threat at tailback, had missed both of his team’s first two games recovering from a hamstring injury.

Without Seabury, the Hornets had managed to beat Liverpool and CBA, but only scored one offensive touchdown in each game. That offense would fare a lot better against Proctor, who had its own 2-0 mark after close wins over Binghamton and Henninger.

Carrying the ball 11 times in the first half, Seabury gained 118 yards, half of them on a single play as he dashed 54 yards to the end zone late in the second quarter.

At that point, F-M only led 10-6, having scored first on John Egnaczyk’s 31-yard field goal and on Owen Neuman’s one-yard TD sneak set up by his lone pass completion of the half, a 26-yard strike to Jack Hannah.

Proctor got on the board with a drive helped by two F-M penalties, Tasean Cooper scoring from six yards out. Seabury answered 12 seconds later, though, and the Hornets led 17-6 at the break.

Throughout the second half, Proctor had little trouble moving the ball as the Hornets’ defense, so strong in the first two weeks, had difficulty making tackles to prevent prolonged gains.

Each time the Raiders scored, though, F-M answered it, constantly making Proctor pay for stacking the line of scrimmage as Neuman found Hannah for a 24-yard scoring pass late in the third quarter.

Then, after Patrick Minor scored early in the final period, the Hornets, from midfield, put together a winning drive. The key was a fourth-down, 21-yard catch-and-run as, again, Neuman threw it to Hannah, just as he would from eight yards out for what proved to be the winning TD with 8:29 left.

Down 31-20, the Raiders moved down the field again, but burned more than five minutes of clock. Cooper scored from three yards out and threw a two-point pass to Victor Lebron.

But Proctor’s onside kick only went five yards and F-M picked up two first downs to run out the clock. Zach Page led the ground attack in the second half, finishing with 101 yards on 16 carries.

And now the Hornets get C-NS, who is no. 8 in the state AA ranking. In its first three games, the Northstars have outscored its opponents by a combined 118-16 margin.