The Greatest Game Ever Played – Andrean vs Griffith (Written November of 2014)

It wasn’t exactly spontaneous. Not everything about it, at least. Yes, Tommy Finn would be lying if he told you that he and his 2004 Andrean teammates had practiced this precise situation, 4th down and 26 yards to go, behind by a touchdown, 33 yards from an end zone protected by a Griffith team that had laid a savage beating on them just a few weeks before. But desperation, more generally?

“We prepared,” Finn says today, “for situations like that.”

The score was 35-28, with about two minutes to play and the Class 3A sectional title on the line. Doing battle were perhaps the top two teams in their size class, in all of Indiana, separated by just a few minutes of Lake County back roads.

Finn, Andrean’s dual threat quarterback and probably the Region’s best player that autumn, lined up to receive a shotgun snap, and glanced over at his primary target on the play, receiver Jake Kocal.

Anticipating a throw to Kocal, Griffith had lined up with double-coverage on him. “I thought, ‘S__, this doesn’t look good,” Finn says now. Finn received the snap, and within moments, a Griffith defensive player broke through Andrean’s protection and bore down on him. Now it was time for a split-second decision.

Now it was time for spontaneity. The quarterback, so far as he could, considered his limited options. Finn could lead Kocal with a throw out of the defenders’ reach, but he quickly calculated that such a throw would end up out of bounds, ending his team’s season. So he improvised.

“I threw it inside,” Finn says, “and he made a hell of a play turning around. The coaches had talked to him about turning his shoulders on a bad throw. Thank God he realized what we were intending to do.”
Kocal hauled the ball in for a miracle Andrean touchdown and, suddenly, the score was 35-34. As the 59ers sent out the kicking unit for the point-after touchdown attempt, it looked like overtime was inevitable. And what happened next? That wasn’t exactly spontaneous, either.

***Games dubbed the greatest of all time, in their sport, do not spontaneously combust from nothing. Typically, they serve as the crowning moment of a long-running narrative.

When Duke’s Christian Laettner hit a buzzer-beater to send his team into the 1992 NCAA Final Four, he did it against a Kentucky program that had clawed its way back from crippling NCAA probation. We remember it as much because of that as we do because of a perfectly executed inbounds hurl. Carlton Fisk’s home run in the 1975 World Series bought one more day for a beloved franchise that had not won a title in nearly six decades, and he did it against the dynasty of the era, Cincinnati’s “Big Red Machine.” And on it goes.

So it was with local high school football and Andrean-Griffith, who 10 years ago, on the night of November 5, 2004, played the greatest game ever in this Region. “Those games,” says Hunter Rogowski, a standout on the ’02 and ’03 Griffith squads. “I’ve got goose bumps still taking about them.”

In 2002, in an early regular-season showdown, Andrean had prevailed in overtime 26-23. Finn, a sophomore, had been a wide receiver on that team.

After Griffith took a 23-20 lead in overtime, Finn’s second touchdown reception of the night gave his team the victory. Just minutes before, with 14.2 seconds to play, the Panrthers had executed a hook-and-ladder gadget play for a 70-yard tying touchdown in regulation. A missed extra point sent the game to overtime.

Notably, on Finn’s winning touchdown, Griffith defensive back Rich Lehmann, who would go on to play quarterback against Finn in subsequent match-ups between the teams, including the ’04 game, allegedly sustained a concussion in the Andrean celebration.

“Trampled,” Rogowski says, “I guess you could say.”

Lehmann says he was knocked unconscious. “I got purposefully kicked in the head, which immediately knocked me out,” Lehmann says today. “Ticked a lot of people off, fueling the rivalry.”

In 2003, the teams met twice. First, in the regular-season, the 59ers again prevailed in overtime, 28-27. Then, in the Class 3A sectional championship game on November 7, Andrean kicker Mark Edwards, who had fumbled a punt snap and missed a point-after touchdown previously in the game, nailed a 46-yard field goal with 1:50 to play to redeem himself and give his undefeated team a 16-14 victory and the title.

There was, among all of the heart-stoppers and instant classics, a single blow-out. It, too, however, would loom large over the sectional championship match-up. Perhaps largest of all.

On October 8, just four weeks prior to the November 5 sectional title game, the same two teams had met in the same time-worn stadium, Griffith’s atmospheric “Boneyard,” named after the Panthers iconic “wishbone” formation offense. The year before, “This time, its personal” T-shirts had sprung up all over town, in advance of the Panthers’ matchup with the 59ers in the sectional title game.

Griffith carried the rogue reputation – “People were writing about the convicts against the Catholics,” Rogowki recalls of those years, “but we liked it.”

In the first meeting back in 2004, it was Andrean that lost its head. The 59ers collected six unsportsmanlike conduct penalties.

Meanwhile, the Panthers showed no mercy. In the fourth quarter, Griffith went up 42-7 on a 66-yard touchdown run by quarterback Rich Lehmann. The Panthers then attempted a two-point conversion. That wasn’t the end of things, though. Not by a long shot.

A quarter later, now ahead 42-14, the Panthers faced a definite punt situation, and lined up that way. Instead, up man Matt Nelleman took the snap, and pitched to punter Jarrod Macak. First down, Panthers.

Shortly after the victory, Griffith coach Russ Radtke was asked if there was bad blood between the two programs. “What kind of question is that?” Radtke barked, and stared at the ground, incensed.

In the weeks that would follow, Andrean mostly worried about righting its own ship, which was careening badly by the night of the Griffith loss. But as November arrived, and the rematch with the Panthers was finally set, according to Finn, who would only find this out after the fact, coach Brett St. Germain and Kocal engaged in a running inside joke.

If, against all odds, the 59ers found themselves winning by a large amount in the fourth quarter, and scored, they wouldn’t merely go for two. They would fake the PAT, and then run it in. It was to be a nifty combination of Griffith’s two memorable twists of the knife in the prior contest.

“I hate to say it, but it was definitely about revenge,” says Ty Harangody, Andrean’s star tight end from that team, who would go on to play at Indiana University. “It’s not like it was a friendly rivalry between us and Griffith. I knew it was going to be an intense game. I knew we were gonna fight hard. But never in a million years would I think it would turn out the way it did.”

*** While Andrean-Griffith 2004 will always and rightfully be remembered for the frenzied final two-plus minutes, beginning with that shotgun snap to Finn, what cannot be lost is how incredible the game was from start to finish.

At school that day, an Andrean player ripped a spare part from a leftover Halloween decoration lying around 5959 Broadway, a skeleton. Against the stern warning of assistant coach Roy Dakich, who had caught wind of the plan, the players ran out onto the Griffith field holding up the bone, mocking on its home field a program that had beaten it by five touchdowns less than a month before.

Just seven years before, the two programs had cheered each other on wildly at the RCA Dome, as they played back-to-back games for their then-respective class state championships. It seemed like a lifetime had passed.

The same could be said about the pasting put on the 59ers by the Panthers a few weeks before.

Griffith’s quarterback, Lehmann, expected nothing of the sort this time around. “We went into that game expecting a war,” says Lehmann, who would go on to continue his football career at Wabash College. “We played one of our best games the first time around, but we also knew Andrean made mistakes and missed some plays they usually make.

“We were also watching them closely the following weeks after our first game, and they murdered whoever they played.”

Before the game, Steve Egan, an Andrean senior out since early in the season with an injury, gave a stirring locker room speech that centered not on the rivalry with Griffith, but about living to fight another day alongside the best friends you would ever have. “I was roused,” Harangody says. “I was definitely roused.”

Outwardly, as the bravado with the bone indicated, the 59ers had put the earlier loss behind them. But for 16-to-18-year-old kids, the doubts still swirled beneath the surface. “We knew we had to go through them,” Finn says. “They clobbered us earlier in the season. We definitely had to go through them.”

The doubts melted away after a first-half drive that ate up eight or nine minutes of clock, as Finn recalls. The 59ers didn’t even score on the drive, but they had gone toe-to-toe with their prior tormentor, and came out standing.

While Griffith had run the option-oriented wishbone offense for decades, this time it was bombs away Andrean that ran wishbone, keeping the ball on the ground.

For the Panthers, despite their more extensive experience running it, the high-risk, high reward attack led to three lost fumbles, two of which Andrean converted into touchdowns.

Still, on the strength of 143 yards rushing and four touchdowns by fullback Nelleman, Griffith went up 35-28 with 6:38 to play in the fourth quarter.

“So many times during that game,” Finn says, “we’re in a good position, then they’d return a kick for a touchdown or something. It’s like, ‘Come on, man, really? It can’t just be easy?’”

***After the Panthers’ touchdown, Andrean began its march toward destiny. The Finn-to-Kocal miracle came with 2:06 on the clock. It wasn’t the precise circumstance they had imagined, but now it was time to make St. Germain and Kocal’s inside joke reality. Finn, now the holder, took the snap for the extra point. Earlier in the game, having taken the lead 28-21, the 59ers considered running a fake extra point to put some distance between themselves and the Panthers – and keep momentum squarely on their side.

Now, with the Boneyard still buzzing over the touchdown, and anticipating Griffith’s upcoming last-ditch drive, he didn’t place the ball on the ground, as expected. Instead, Finn sprang from his crouch and pitched the ball to Kocal, now the kicker.

As Kocal recalls now, only a few people in the stadium had known what was about to happen. Andrean’s linemen, oblivious, continued to block for an extra point. However, seconds before the kick, St. Germain had signaled to Finn that a fake was on.

“It wasn’t until that very last second that I realized exactly what we were doing,” says Kocal. “We made it happen in the heat of the moment. We didn’t have time to get nervous. Tommy’s eyes kind of lit up and I thought, ‘Oh, no. Here we go.’”

Only playing his second year of football, Kocal says today that he didn’t have the foundation in the sport to grasp how huge the moment was, either on the touchdown throw into double coverage, or, now, on a fake extra point with the game in the balance.

“The play calls are hysterical, looking back on it,” he says. “What were we thinking?” His lack of experience was, in fact, a blessing, because he didn’t feel enough pressure to botch the execution. Instead, just like at practice, Kocal ran it in to the same side of the end zone he had just hauled in Finn’s throw for a two-point conversion to make the score Andrean 36, Griffith 35.

On its ensuing drive, Griffith would advance the ball to the Andrean 28-yard line, verging on field-goal range. But the Panthers weren’t close enough yet. Lehmann’s final pass was intercepted by Andrean’s Bob Puchalski as time ran out, giving Andrean the win in what still stands as the greatest Region game ever played, part of perhaps the greatest local rivalry ever staged.

Three weeks later, to put an explanation point on the season, the 59ers beat Heritage Hills to become the 2004 Indiana Class 3A state champions. “If we hadn’t won that game,” Finn says of the Panthers, “they’d have won state.”

That’s little solace in Griffith, where games of such magnitude, at least for now, seem like a more distant memory than just 10 years would indicate.

“We worked hard for many years to get to that point,” says Griffith’s Lehmann, who lined up against Harangody on the side opposite from Kocal’s catch for the winning touchdown. “It would have meant the world for us to win that game. … It’s been almost 10 years, and to be honest, I haven’t watched the tape of the game.”