MISQUAH — Pike opened its season Friday at Braham and lost 21–14, and if that sentence is all you read you will have the wrong idea about the evening.

Pike trailed 14–0 at the half and did not look like a team that was going to trail 14–0. Braham scored on its second possession on a run that should have been stopped twice, and again with forty seconds left in the second quarter on a drive that Pike extended with two penalties, both of them the kind a coach can live with and one of them the kind he cannot.

Then the third quarter, which head coach Ryan Mattox has been describing since Saturday as the part he does not understand. Pike came out and drove eighty-one yards in eleven plays, all of them on the ground, and the line — which Mattox has been saying since August is further along than last year — moved a Braham front that had been in the backfield the entire first half. Jon Sandbo, the sophomore center, played every snap of the game.

Braham answered on its next possession. Pike scored again with 4:11 left, got the ball back at its own 31 with 1:52 and no timeouts, and moved it to the Braham 12 with a completion on the sideline that stopped the clock at nine seconds. The fourth-down throw went off a receiver’s hands in the end zone.

Mattox’s postgame, in full: “We were tired in the third quarter and we weren’t in the fourth. I don’t know what to tell you about the third quarter. We’ll find out Tuesday.”

Braham has beaten Pike four straight years and six of the last eight, and this is the closest of the six. The bus was back at the school at 10:40 and, per two witnesses, was not quiet.

Pike is home Friday against Hinckley at 7 — the first home game of the year. The junior class runs concessions and has announced, on a sign taped to the gym door, that there will be pie.