It was the start of the fourth quarter in the 2A High School State Championship game, Meridian was trailing 39-14, and it looked like all hope could be lost, but it wasn’t our time, and we weren’t going down without a fight.

Suddenly, four minutes into the quarter, we found ourselves in good position to win; as the score was now cut down to 39-28. We still realized we had little time to stop this team from scoring, and we had to score over ten points in eight minutes.

Luckily, we had scored again and had the ball with less than two minutes to go, and the coach called a timeout to give us this great speech, he said, “It’s not our time; we’re not going. There’s a fear in us, but were not going to show it. This could be the end of us and everything we worked for.”

The team was motivated by the speech. We converted on two big third down plays to get to their 45 yard-line, with 56 seconds left, coach told the quarterback, “You know what to do now.” The quarterback took over. In just three plays he had taken us down to their 35 yard-line, with exactly 30 seconds left. In the next play he threw the ball and completed it to move the ball to the 10 yard-line, but the clock was ticking. The team had no timeouts left, so they had to hurry up to get to the line to spike the ball, which they did with 12 seconds left. Our team didn’t have a kicker so we had to go for the end zone. Next play we ran, “Flex right 87-78,” usually works, and it did, the score was now 41-39, after the blocked PAT. We pooch kicked the ball down the middle on the kickoff, they returned it to the 25 yard-line, not good for us because they had a great kicker who could kick 42 yard field goals, and that’s what this kick was. If he were to make it, he would win the game for them and time would have expired. The defense had other plans though; when they lined up to kick it, everybody rushed, and someone, somehow got a hand on the ball just enough to alter its course and hit off the right upright.

Happily ever after, the Meridian Hawks won their first ever football state championship game with the final score 41-39.