Professional sports has this morose adage: Only one team ends the season successfully. Thanks to the sports gods that that isn't true in high-school competition. For, if it were, Moriah's football Vikings would be robbed of the glory and memories they so richly earned in their historic season of 2008.
When the Philadelphia Phillies closed out the Tampa Bay Rays in the World Series, the Red Sox, Yankees, Mets and every other team had to look forward to enduring the long winters of their discontent. According to professional-sports wisdom, only the New York Giants sipped from the cup of success after last year's Super Bowl win. For all the others, it was a season of futile and unfulfilling toil.
Such a proposition is nonsense, of course. Success is not always reflected in the final score, even where paychecks are the eventual stake. Surely, Tampa Bay will relish for some time its team's improbable, unexpected run to the final series in the cutthroat winnowing of Major League Baseball.
So it is with the Vikings. Anybody who says Moriah didn't have a successful football season didn't witness the way Southern Essex County rallied around the team and the players who gave them a rare trip through the stratosphere.
Not that the Mineville/Port Henry area hasn't ever tasted athletic success. On the contrary, that section of the North Country helped write sports history going back a century. If baseball was born in the Leather Stocking Region, it was nurtured in Essex County, along with Dannemora and environs in Clinton County.
Moriah has almost always fielded a solid football team. Ticonderoga and Moriah have deserved reputations for being competitive on the gridiron. Last year, Ticonderoga took Section VII into the state finals; this year, it was Moriah's destiny.
The Press-Republican chronicled the Vikings' run to the league and sectional championships leading up to the state Class D finals. It also reported on the understandable enthusiasm of the people of the area, for whom the past season has been an early glimpse at heaven. Moriah went through the season undefeated for the first time in its history, getting to the Carrier Dome game in Syracuse by outlasting Ticonderoga, 15-14, and polishing off Rensselaer, outside Albany, 19-0, in the state tournament.
Like Ticonderoga the year before, Moriah lost the final game by a convincing margin. But, like the people of Ticonderoga, the Moriah fans at the game never betrayed a loss of faith in or appreciation for their athletes. Ti had been beaten by powerhouse Walton, 64-6. This year, Maple Grove, near Buffalo, defeated Moriah, 55-7.
A photo of the Moriah bench toward the end of the game depicted a somber group. The coaches and fans, however, remained as proud as they would have been if the score had been reversed.
Senior Jim Carlson's remarkable season of 1,630 years and 24 touchdowns will never be forgotten. Neither will the euphoria Coach Don Tesar's squad delivered to the community — with or without that final victory.
