I’ve never experienced anything like this.
The nor’easter came through, canceled the homecoming parade, canceled the bonfire the night before, and pushed the start time from 1:30 in the afternoon to 10 a.m. in the morning. I guess it couldn’t be any other way. A hundred and thirty years, one of the oldest rivalries in New York State, and it was going to happen in the middle of a nor’easter. This is the Breakfast Brawl, the 130th Spirit Trophy, and this is Friday Night Films.
I came back to Section 9 thirty years later to show the world what’s going on in my hometown, in my home area. And this, this is as good as it gets. I did not expect a weather event. But this is also cinema. And what better story to tell?
Watch the full film above, and here’s what you need to know going in.
What you’re seeing in this game is hitting at a next level. What you’re seeing is intensity at a next level. What you’re seeing is guts at the next level. Guys playing injured, guys playing hurt, guys playing on one arm or one leg, and they’re leaving it all out there on the field. Why? Because Warwick versus Goshen is everything for these two schools. The Spirit Trophy goes back a century plus. Every Warwick Wildcat and every Goshen Gladiator circles this on the schedule.
It was a field position battle all day. A true slog in the elements. This is the game you talk about with your boys thirty years later at the reunion.
Goshen got on the board first, Dom Cusumano from 6 out. Warwick answered, Quinn O’Brien from six yards out, tied up at six. The two-point conversion was no good. And then the rains came. The skies opened. Passing was impossible. Backyard football, that’s all it was. Every exchange from center to quarterback, or snap to the punter, was an adventure. It was a breakfast bog, football in a quagmire, a track better suited for a tractor pull than this game.
Goshen had a chance late. On fourth and 17, JP Sullivan hit Emeric Greco for the first down. And then on fourth and goal from the seven, forget the field goal, they ran a reverse to Greco, and Goshen had the lead, 12-6. The rain came again, and Warwick had two late drives that stalled. Goshen held, and that held up the Spirit Trophy.
In the postgame, I asked coach John Stephens about the decision to go for it on fourth down instead of kicking the go-ahead field goal.
“Trust. Simple as that,” Stephens said. “Had to have some kind of trickery in it, and trusted it, and trusted the kids to execute. That’s all.”
I asked him whether the weather felt like an adversity to move through, or just added to the cinema.
“Now, these kids don’t care. We don’t care. Play, put the ball down. These kids just want to play football. That’s all we want to do. We’ll play anytime, any day,” Stephens said. “The kids prepare all week and they don’t let anything else outside of what we can control affect how they think or what they do.”
I asked what it meant to keep the Spirit Trophy for another year.
“The way that we play football, we just think about the next play. Chipping away. Winning takes care of itself,” Stephens said. “So the aftermath and seeing them celebrate and enjoy this for their memories, that’s what’s really important to us from today.”
Dom Cusumano, who finished with 30 of Goshen’s 37 carries on the day, talked me through the touchdown.
“Seen daylight, baby. There’s nobody around me. I just took off, went as fast as I could, and put us up six early in the game,” Cusumano said of his early score. On the game-winning reverse, he broke down exactly how it came together: “We ran that play once in practice. It was actually supposed to be an H pass, and then I saw he was covered in the corner, so I just ran and took it myself.”
A Goshen player summed up the conditions simply afterward: “It was a hell of a game played by my teammates. As you can see, we’re all muddy, but it was worth it.”
The rains came and went. The Spirit Trophy stayed in Goshen. I’ve never experienced anything like this. You couldn’t move the football through the air. The ground was wet, the ball was wet, you could barely see 10 yards downfield at the heaviest point of the storm. This was trenches. This was a ground attack and all field position.
It’s a great start for the Gladiators. They’re now 4-0, and they retain the Spirit Trophy for the first time in 30 years back-to-back. It had to be like this. It had to. It’s the 130th anniversary of this rivalry, a historic, iconic rivalry, and it lived up to its billing and to the 129 previous matchups before it.
These are the players, the teams, and the stories of your community. This is Friday Night Films, and I’m proud to bring it to you.
