Hidden Valley High School football coach Scott Weaver has an analytical saying.
“If something happens once, it might be a fluke. It it happens two or three times it may be a trend.”
You could make the argument Hidden Valley has established a trend, even if by the hair on their chin.
Connecting on a 12-yard touchdown pass from senior quarterback Jonah Fitzgerald to sophomore Kelly Mitchell with 17 seconds left in the game, Hidden Valley came from behind to pull out the 23-22 win over Cave Spring Friday night at Dwight Bogle Stadium.
It was the Titans’ seventh straight win over the Knights in the traditional regular season finale played at Bogle, the home field shared by both schools.
Since the last time Cave Spring won this showdown, 34-10 in 2010, there have been a number of classics. None better than the 2-overtime 41-39 win by Hidden Valley in 2011 and the 11-10 win by the Titans in 2014 when Hidden Valley rallied from a fourth quarter 10-0 deficit to score on a field goal, touchdown and 2-point conversion.
The largest margin of victory for the Titans in the last four years has been 7 points. In the early years after Hidden Valley was spun off from Cave Spring in 2002, it was the Knights who dominated. Hidden Valley reversed that trend with a win in 2006, the first of four straight for the Titans.
Friday night, Hidden Valley jumped out to a 10-0 lead on a Fitzgerald 5-yard TD run and Michael Driscoll 32-yard field goal before Cave Spring rallied late in the first half when Knight quarterback Jacob Knight connected with Austin Ragan on a 6-yard toss that sent the teams to the locker room with the Titans up 10-7.
Hidden Valley went up 17-7 on a Fitzgerald to Jared Arner 22-yard scoring pass to open the second half scoring, but Cave Spring followed with 15 unanswered points on Lucas Duncan’s 3-yard touchdown run that he capped with another run for the 2-point conversion, and Knight’s 52-yard aerial hookup with Ragan that had Cave Spring ahead 22-17.
That set up the final Hidden Valley score set up by a blocked punt, and the frantic final seconds that the fans of this rivalry have come to expect. The two teams both finished with identical 2-8 records, with Cave Spring reportedly earning a post-season playoff berth despite the loss.
They two quarterbacks kept things up for grabs all night as Fitzgerald threw for 354 yards and Knight connected on 281.
Bill Turner
