REV-Centennial: Game of Year that Didn't Happen
I am in, oh, I suppose you could even call it "mourning," over the prep football game that is NOT happening tomorrow:
Redlands East Valley vs. Corona Centennial for the Inland Division CIF-SS championship, noon kickoff, Home Depot Center.
It was going to be 13-0 REV vs. 12-1 Centennial, with the winner in good position to play for the STATE large-schools championship next weekend.
And then it started raining last Friday, and didn't let up until REV had fumbled three times and thrown two interceptions in a 25-10 loss to a Corona Santiago team they should have beaten.
I don't blame anyone; if that game is played on a dry field, which we have here about 355 days a year ... REV probably beats a 7-4 team.
I rue REV's defeat mostly because it would have meant for at least one Big Game this season. Maybe two.
There was a time when we fairly regularly had big games ... BIG games ... involving San Bernardino County football teams. From 1976 through 1993, Citrus Belt League schools (Fontana, Eisenhower, Redlands, Colton, even San Gorgonio) played for the "large schools" CIF championship no fewer than nine times. In 18 seasons.
The eastern half of San Bernardino County was the epicenter of top-flight prep football for almost a generation, there, and those of us who lived through it as journalists, coaches, players, fans ... perhaps we got a little spoiled.
Thing certainly have changed, since. CIF football titles have been won around here since then, for sure, but all of them in the lower divisions. Wonderful accomplishments, but not the sort of "the whole Southern Section is watching" games we got used to between '76 and '93.
Had REV won last week ... we would have had one of those games for the first time in 14 years. Centennial is the top-rated Division I school in SoCal polls, and REV would have been close behind ... and a victory over Centennial very likely would have put REV into the state title game the following week and ...
Well, it would have been as huge as these things get, these days.
(Redlands got to the Inland semis last year, and lost a weird, OT game to eventual champ Norco, but the Terriers weren't going to play for a state title, even had they won out; they weren't as highly regarded in the polls.)
I'm sorry REV-Centennial didn't happen. Self-pity is involved, for sure ... but I feel bad for anyone under 25 who never has had the chance to see a local team play in a seriously important/widely watched game.
Could have happened.