Final game makes for a special night

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They held a going-away party in Biddeford last Friday night. You may have heard about it. Heck, you may even have been one of the 5,000 or so who packed Waterhouse Field for the festivities.

The honorees? Eighty-eight of the state’s top recently graduated football stars. The guests? Anyone who wanted to pay a little cash and sit fanny-to-fanny on hardwood planks, just to see their hometown heroes play one last time.

Nothing special there, you say.

Every high school team sport holds an all-star game nowadays, it seems. This one was just more of the same.

Not so fast.

This one was special. … just like it is every single year.

You could credit the sponsors for that. The Shriners, you probably know, do the kind of charity work that nobody wants to have to accept.

They also do the kind of work that thousands of parents find out … the hard way … is invaluable.

But last Friday’s football game was a notch above the garden-variety contest-for-a-cause.

In some ways, that’s surprising. Football’s a brutal, physical sport, after all. It doesn’t lend itself to the kind of all-offense, feel-good exhibitions that work perfectly well in most other sports.

In football, if you go half-speed for a play, you end up flat on your back, looking out your ear-hole.

So there your hometown heroes were, early Friday evening. Stretching. Doing calisthenics. Finding out that even after a week of practices, things are a bit different than they were back in November.

Just ask Justin Cummings. The former Stearns High star spent a little time before the game explaining the bloody mess that results when you keep blistering the same heel for seven straight day.

“We ran a lot,” he said as a trainer peeled off bloody gauze and replaced it with a fresh layer of padding. “It’s been killing me.”

Cummings is one of the lucky ones, you know. In two weeks, he’ll be back in a football training camp. Just like he is every August, when the hottest days of summer roll around, and pals are spending afternoons at the lake.

He’s heading to Maine Maritime Academy. Nice little Division III program. Plenty of these guys end up in places like that. Others – like Portland star Quinton Porter – climb the ladder and head to places like Boston College.

And others? Well, Friday’s party was really for them.

The coaches made sure that they all knew it. Just ask former Oxford Hills star Mike Mowatt. He’ll tell you what happened when he headed to the locker room with the rest of his East squad at halftime.

“At the half we just got fired up,” he said softly. “We knew it was gonna be one of the last games anyone played, so we just gave it our all.”

And as friends and family milled around storied Waterhouse Field late Friday night, Mowatt (another of the lucky ones who’s good enough to play some college ball) shook his head and explained what that meant.

“It doesn’t feel too good,” he said.

But before they left – some to bigger things, others to better things, and still others to entirely different things that have nothing to do with sweating and bleeding and bonding – they had a little party.

You might have been there. It was special.

Because a lot of these guys – your very own hometown heroes – will never, ever play this game again. And they knew it.

“Just cleaned the locker room,” a worker announced even later Friday night, after the lights had dimmed and the players had said goodbye, one last time.

“A lot of guys just left their cleats right here,” the worker said, shaking his head.

“They always do that.”

John Holyoke is a NEWS sportswriter. His e-mail address is jholyoke@bangordailynews.net