When the Jamesville-DeWitt football team went to East Syracuse Minoa and prevailed in overtime on the Spartans’ home field in 2017, it meant a lot.
Yet when it happened again Friday night on home turf, it meant even more to the Red Rams.
By toppling ESM 28-20, J-D not only avoided a winless regular season, it averted the fate of being the only one of nine teams in the Section III Class A ranks to miss the playoffs.
The ability to continue its season one more week was something the Rams celebrated while, at the same time, continuing a rare skid for the Spartans, who have dropped five in a row after a 2-0 start.
During a low-scoring first half, each side put together a single scoring drive. J-D seized a 6-0 lead late in the opening period, moving to ESM’s two-yard line before Adam Honis sneaked it in.
To answer, the Spartans relied on its ground attack and, reaching the Rams’ one-yard line, tied it Dante Coccagnia’s touchdown sneak. A missed conversion left the teams at 6-6 going into the break.
What was a close, tightly-fought battle broke open on the first play of the third quarter. From his own 35, Honis threw deep over the middle and found Pat Murad, who sprinted into the end zone. Honis then made the two-point conversion.
Again, ESM would put together a drive of its own, Albert Wells going the last three yards for the TD and also running in the conversion that tied it a second time, 14-14, midway through the period.
Going back to the air, Honis, from the Spartans’ 29, found Ryan Vespi down the left sideline, and this would give J-D the lead for good.
Early in the fourth quarter, the Rams drove to ESM’s 10, where Honis threw his third TD pass of the night on a crossing pattern to Murad, and those points would be needed.
With 7:37 left, Wells scored a second time on a five-yard run. The conversion was missed, and while J-D didn’t score again, its defense kept making big stops down the stretch.
What all this adds up to is that J-D, in the first round of the sectional playoffs, travels north on Friday to face Carthage, while ESM heads east and faces the tall task of upending three-time defending champion Whitesboro, though it only lost 7-0 to the Warriors during the regular season.
Both games start at 7 p.m., and the winners move on to next weekend’s sectional semifinals, with the ESM-Whitesboro and J-D-Carthage winners getting each other in the semifinals as the other first-round game pit Indian River against Fulton, plus Auburn against Central Square.
