By John Raffel
Lansing Catholic almost pulled off the comeback of the weekend in the state football championships at Ford Field.
The Cougars fell to Grand Rapids West Catholic, 24-20, but but came extremely close to winning that elusive state title for coach Jim Ahern.
Travis Russell’s 8-yard run with 1:43 left in the first half gave West Catholic a 17-0 lead. Ben Rashid’s 31-yard kickoff return put the Cougars in business, and Tony Poljan’s 7-yard touchdown run on a quarterback keeper made it a 17-6 game.
The Cougars narrowed the score to 17-13 on Poljan’s 41-yard touchdown pass to Tony Palmer with 1:37 left in the third.
The go-ahead score, with 7:38 to play, came off a drive that started from the Cougar 4 yard line. It included two clutch passes on fourth down by Poljan, including a 10-yarder to Zac Baker and a 22-yard scoring pass to Tony Palmer for a 17-20 lead.
“We caught the ball a little better in the first half than the second half,” coach Jim Ahern said. “That was probably the biggest difference. We just dropped some in the first half.”
West Catholic put together a 64-yard drive that ended on Travis Russell’s 3-yard run with 1:07 to play, and it included controversy. Russell passed 8 yards to Conner Nemmers to keep the drive going, and the replays clearly showed that the ball hit the ground. Lansing Catholic fans booed while watching it on the screens at Ford Field, but with no replays in high school football, the play stood, and West Catholic drove for the winning score.
“We couldn’t stop them on the last drive,” Ahern said. “The ball on the ground doesn’t mean much. You have seven [officials] out there, and you think someone would see it, but they didn’t. It wasn’t meant to be, I guess.”
Both teams entered the game with 13-0 records.
Poljan ran for 60 yards on 15 carries and completed 24 of 34 passes for 269 yards.
“When we can catch it and get into the tempo, we got a pretty good rhythm going,” Ahern said. “In the first half, we weren’t able to do that. That threw us a little off our game. You have to give a lot of credit to West Catholic. That’s a heckuva football team. It looks real complex, and they do a lot of simple things from a lot of formations, but we couldn’t stop it.”
West Catholic quarterback Travis Russell gained 55 yards rushing and passed for 165 yards, including an 87-yarder to Charlie O’Connor for a touchdown.
“He can really run and has some good receivers too,” Ahern said of Russell. “Our teams are really similar. We gave up that one early. That really hurt. That’s the first big play we’ve given up in a long time. That put us a hole a little bit early.
“They did exactly what we thought, which is kind of sad, because we couldn’t stop it. When you play in these kinds of games, and it comes down to usually one or two plays, that makes a difference.”
The game had several different plays to make Lansing Catholic players, coaches, and fans ponder what might have been. “You’d like to sit here and say this play or that play by the official might have done it,” Ahern said. “There were probably 60 plays they ran, like the quarterback power, that we didn’t stop. There was a lot of plays like that, too.”
“We had a slow first half,” senior running back Jack Peters said. “We picked it up in the second half. I felt we had it. West Catholic is a good team, credit to them. We had a slow start in our [semifinal victory] over Almont. The same thing happened [today]. At halftime, we came out firing on all cylinders.”
It’s been an “awesome season” for the Cougars, Peters said. “Coach Ahern is the best coach I’ve ever played for. The brotherhood on his team is phenomenal. I love all these guys to death.”
It was tough for the seniors to say goodbye to the program after such a memorable season. “We made it to Ford FIeld; that was one of the goals,” Peters said. “We just couldn’t [win the state title]. But I wouldn’t give up [the experience] for anything.”