CEDAR FALLS, Iowa – It’s 12:53 p.m. on the biggest Saturday of the University of Maine football team’s season, and Paul Culina paces the sideline, jaw tense, game face firmly cinched in place.

Kickoff of the NCAA Division I-AA playoff game against Northern Iowa looms just 37 minutes away. You’d figure that Culina – the UMaine trainer – would have completed his rounds long before now.

But this isn’t a typical Saturday. Some Bears have some decisions to make. And Culina is the man they trust to help make them.

“He’s the last decision,” Culina says, pointing at the Black Bear wearing the No. 28 jersey. “I’ve already made two. It’s not game time until 1:30.”

Then Culina steals a quick peak at his watch. It’s a gesture that tells more than he’s willing, or able, to.

The Black Bears headed to Iowa with three injured starters. One, offensive lineman Ben Lazarski, will play. Another, free safety David Cusano, won’t.

The only decision left revolves around No. 28.

His name is Royston English. He’s the Bears’ top running back. And though neither Culina nor coach Jack Cosgrove knows it yet, his career will end today.

Eventually, all the UMaine seniors will find out that their careers have ended: Northern Iowa will reel off 28 straight points over the final 19 minutes of the game and win 56-28. The Panthers earn a trip to Montana. The Black Bears go home.

But while many of the Bears who led the UMaine playoff run will leave the UNI-Dome battered, or sweating, or tired, English won’t.

His career is already over. English won’t play a down.

Pre-game tests

A couple of hours before Saturday’s game, the Black Bears periodically make their way from the locker room into the UNI-Dome and do individual warm-ups.

Some throw. Some stretch. Others, like English, walk around and wince.

Two hours before kickoff, Cusano looks good. He throws a ball back and forth with teammate Jimmy Pederson and does light footwork drills that simulate what he might face in the game.

He and Pederson smile and laugh, and Cusano looks limber, agile and eager, … just like you want your defensive backs to look.

Appearances can be deceiving.

When the Bears emerge from the locker room for more organized warm-ups a bit later, Cusano is wearing a game jersey. He’s also wearing shorts, while the rest of the Bears are in full pads.

His career isn’t over, but his season certainly is.

“I just wanted to go out and run around a little bit and test it out, see how I felt, and then we came back and made a decision then,” Cusano said.

The decision: With some swelling remaining in his sprained knee, the medical staff was concerned.

“They didn’t want to make it worse,” Cusano said. “And they didn’t know how many plays I would last.”

Faced with those concerns, Cusano sat and rested. He waited. He hoped for the opportunities a “next week” could bring.

It never came.

“Obviously, if I knew this was going to be the last one, I would have suited up,” Cusano said after the loss.

Much ado about nothing

During the week before the game, the sprained knees of Cusano and Lazarski were the areas of concern in the Black Bear camp.

English’s sore right foot didn’t seem to concern anyone. The reason: English has always found a way to end up playing in games, no matter what kind of ailments he regularly nursed during practice.

But this was different. Last Sunday, he couldn’t get out of bed. On Wednesday, he had improved to a slow, ungainly lurch.

People who think English was just taking a self-imposed game-week vacation should have been in the UNI-Dome on Friday, as Culina made him perform some drills.

When he did drills running away from Culina, he winced noticeably every time his right foot hit the ground. And when he ran back toward the trainer, that wince had turned into a pained smile that couldn’t mask the truth: Something’s not right.

So there was Culina, running back and forth, watching English warm up on Saturday afternoon, hoping that the Black Bear workhorse would be able to carry the load.

Culina had ruled out fractures and determined the injury was “nothing serious.”

But that left things entirely up to English.

“It’s really simple,” Culina said. “At that point, it’s just, ‘If you can do it, great, let’s go with it.”‘

And if they can’t?

“You just keep your fingers crossed and hope for next week,” Culina said. “Unfortunately, that’s not the case here.”

After thinking about it for a moment, English approached his position coach, Jeff Comissiong.

“I said, ‘Coach, I can’t benefit the team, so put somebody else in,” a somber English said after the game.

As it turns out, that was the decision nobody thought English would make.

“He just couldn’t go,” Cosgrove said in his postgame press conference. “We worked him out before the game. It surprised me. Maybe nothing should surprise me.”

Though English didn’t play, he did keep busy.

During the game he yelled and gestured, pumping his fists and waving his arms. And when his replacement, freshman James Henry, came to the sideline, English was waiting to give whatever advice he could.

Recurring themes: Keep your head up. Don’t dance. Run hard.

Cusano was involved even before the game started, working with coach Torrian Gray with his fellow defensive backs.

As players made their way toward the sideline at the end of each drill, Cusano greeted them with enthusiastic high fives.

And when the game started, he found out he’d earned a promotion from defensive coordinator Rich Nagy: He was a coach … almost.

“He wanted me to help some of the other guys getting calls and knowing defenses, just keeping them alert on the sidelines in case they had to go in,” Cusano said. “I did my best.”

Did it matter?

So, did missing two starters end up costing the Black Bears a shot at Montana in the national semifinals?

Here’s the easy, knee-jerk answer: No.

Here’s the statistical answer: English’s backup, Henry, rushed 15 times for 76 yards in a game when quarterback Jake Eaton excelled. Eaton threw 44 times and completed 29 passes for 330 yards and three touchdowns.

Cusano’s sub, Jarrod Gomes, led the Bears with nine tackles and had two of the team’s three pass breakups.

And here’s the coach’s daughter’s answer:

“I called up Jeri and I said, ‘What happened?”‘ Cosgrove said on the plane on the way back to Bangor. “And she said, ‘Turnovers, Dad. Turnovers.”‘

Cosgrove shrugged his shoulders. His daughter is 9 years old.

The turnovers certainly didn’t help.

After the game, vignettes played out around the UNI-Dome that told the story as completely as the scoreboard did.

Like this: lineman Pete Richardson walking off the AstroTurf field and dropping his mouthpiece just before he made it into the tunnel. Richardson stopping and turning to retrieve it. Then, after picking his mouthpiece up, Richardson second-guessing, swearing to himself softly and throwing it at the ground, and leaving it behind. He wouldn’t be needing it again this year.

And like this: Northern Iowa fans racing into the end zone, tossing their stuffed-bear-in-effigy over the goalpost, and letting him hang there, defenseless against the punches and kicks and tackles that followed.

But after a few minutes, the Bears began emerging from the locker room. Some – especially the seniors who had chosen to attend UMaine for a variety of reasons, then proceeded to build their own tradition where there was none – had red-rimmed eyes that told everyone what had happened behind those closed doors.

The Bears filed down a hallway and picked up a large Domino’s pizza … each … as a post-game snack.

And they told you this: It didn’t make any difference. There’s no use dwelling on what didn’t happen. Who didn’t play. Where the Bears aren’t going next week.

“If you do that, it’s gonna eat you away on the long trip back,” Cusano said. “You can’t really play the what-if game. I’m using this for motivation for next year.”

It doesn’t matter, Cusano says. It just doesn’t.

“It doesn’t matter if I was out there or Royston was out there, or if we had Barry Sanders or Marshall Faulk,” Cusano said. “The fact is, the scoreboard told a tale.”