Pike Football
Sandstone 28, Pike 14: The Bobcats Scored First and It Did Not Last
Pike opened with an eighty-yard drive and led 7–0 into the second quarter against a team that had outscored two opponents 62–14. The rest of the evening went the way the arithmetic said it would.
MISQUAH — Pike went to Sandstone on Friday and lost 28–14 to a team that is now 3–0 and has scored ninety points in three games, and the honest summary is that Pike hung around for a half and then did not.
The opening drive was the best fourteen plays this team has run all year: eighty yards, twelve of them on the ground, and a score with 6:40 left in the first quarter that put Pike up 7–0 against a defense that had not trailed all season. The visiting sideline, per two people standing near it, got very loud.
Sandstone answered before the quarter ended and again with a minute left in the half. Pike went into the locker room down 14–7 and came out of it down 28–7 before the third quarter was nine minutes old.
Mattox, afterward: “We were tired in the third quarter.”
That is the third consecutive week he has said a version of that sentence, a fact somebody at the Daybreak noticed Saturday morning and has been tracking since, and which this newspaper reports not at the coach’s expense but because the counting has now become its own small local institution. Mattox, informed Monday that a table is keeping score of his postgame remarks, said he was aware and that they were welcome to it and that the third quarter remains the problem.
Pike scored again with four minutes left on a drive the reserves finished. Jon Sandbo took every offensive snap for the third straight week, which is now a hundred and forty-four consecutive snaps for a fifteen-year-old.
Pike is 1–2 and comes home Friday for homecoming against Pine City, who are 3–0.
The statistics: Pike ran thirty-seven times for a hundred and forty-one yards, which is a hundred and twenty-two fewer than it managed against Hinckley, and Sandstone had the ball for better than twenty-one minutes of the second half.
The eighty-yard opening drive is worth keeping in mind for Friday, because it is evidence of something. Pike can play with a good team for a quarter. What it has not shown in three games is a third quarter, and the fourth game is homecoming against a 3–0 Pine City team that has not yet had to come from behind.
The bus was back at the school at 11:05. It was quiet.