Cardiac Cats: One more patented second-half comeback carries St. Ignatius to CCS Open Division championship

SAN JOSE — Second-half SI did it one more time.

St. Ignatius has enjoyed a charmed season on the strength of several second-half comebacks. And in the most important game of their season, the Wildcats did it again.

Trailing St. Francis 7-3 in the fourth quarter of the CCS Open Division championship game, the Wildcats mounted a 14-play drive and converted two fourth downs, including a fourth-and-2 from their own 37-yard line.

Jarious Hogan sealed the win with a 17-yard touchdown run one play after a bad snap set St. Ignatius back five yards. And after SI held off one last St. Francis drive amid pouring rain, the result was official. 

The cardiac Cats were CCS champs.

“We look like we’re down and out, but we keep swinging, keep battling,” said second-year SI coach Lenny Vandermade. “Keep going to the next play and doing our job the best we possibly can, and we find ways to win at the end.

“I’m proud of these guys that keep fighting and keep battling. It’s hard. They’re young people. Young people can very easily get sideways, but they don’t. They keep fighting, keep believing. So I’m just grateful for that. I’m grateful to the seniors, the seniors and the coaches that keep reiterating belief. Not only belief, but working it into reality.”

Not much was going right for SI (10-2) in the second half. The Wildcats had not scored since the first play of the second quarter, when Odhran Kelly nailed a 45-yard field goal to give the Cats a 3-0 lead.

St. Francis took the lead later in the quarter on a spinning 14-yard touchdown run by Kingston Keanaaina.

SI had advanced the ball into St. Francis territory on each of its seven drives, with only three points to show for the first six. But on a day where the weather was treacherous and points were almost impossible to come by, the Wildcats only needed to finish one drive to win the game.

Hogan, who completed the game with 110 rushing yards on 22 carries, made sure that they did.

“It’s a big accomplishment,” Hogan said afterward. “We’ve been knowing that this was going to happen. We’ve been coming to this type of team, reflecting on what we did last time (against them). We knew we couldn’t let up versus these guys, and we knew it was going to be a physical game throughout these 40 minutes, even throughout the weather conditions. We knew it was going to be a hard game.”

A hard game it was. Fumbled snaps were seemingly everywhere as both teams struggled to handle wet balls. Drives that looked promising could be snuffed out in a flash with a big loss.

In a game where every possession mattered, SI’s final score was the most important.

It was also a game where every penalty call mattered, and one more than the rest. 

St. Ignatius faced a fourth-and-10 from the 25-yard line with three minutes to go. Soren Hummel’s pass intended for Quinn Folk fell incomplete, but St. Francis was penalized for pass interference. 

The call gave SI’s drive new life with a first down, and the Wildcats capitalized with a touchdown two plays later.

“They called the penalty on it, so it’s a penalty,” said Lancers coach Greg Calcagno. “So we’ve got to overcome all those. We can’t get in that situation. We could have gotten that first down on our previous fourth down, but we fumbled the snap.

“If we can keep the ball, we could go down and score a touchdown. It’s a moot point to me anyway. So we have to be better at stuff we can control.”

SI fumbled its next snap five yards backward, adding to the chaos. But the Wildcats managed to keep their heads and capitalize on the opportunity.

“I wasn’t quite sure what happened,” Vandermade said. “They were going back and forth, but I saw the flag, here we go, and let’s keep playing. It’s one of those things. We just try to do our job, and whatever happens, happens. Obviously, the ref saw something there, and we were very fortunate to get a new set of downs and keep playing.”

Despite the loss, St. Francis’ season isn’t over yet. Under the CCS’s Open/Division I format, the Lancers (9-3) will now drop down to the CCS Division I championship next week against the winner of Los Gatos and Riordan’s game in San Francisco on Saturday.

“We can’t dwell on the past,” Calcagno said. “We have an opportunity to play again, and we’ll be back here next week, and we’ll be ready. We’ll show up.”

But the night belonged to St. Ignatius, which had not won a CCS Open Division championship in 12 years. The Cats’ season of living on the edge has given them the opportunity to take part in a NorCal regional championship game for the first time in a generation.

And with a bye week secured ahead of that impending matchup two weeks away, the party is just getting started.

“I don’t know why we just kick in the second half,” Hogan said. “We’ve got to start using that energy to do it throughout the 48 minutes. But we still have yet to put up a full good football game yet. The longer your season is, the harder teams we’re going to face. 

“We’re going to learn from this. See what we did wrong in the first half and the second half, reflect on it moving forward towards our next opponent. (But) all of us deserve this. We all deserve to have a great time going back to SI.”