He woke up stuck. The digits on his cellphone screen screamed 3 a.m. He was trapped by time, these after-midnight hours getting in the way of himself and his heroics. “I woke up thinking about making big plays,” Milo Hall recalled. “(Noon) needs to hurry up, because that’s when the bus leaves for the game.”
He slipped into a slumber but was up again by 5 a.m. Not able to sleep, the star senior running back for Cherry Creek High School touched his iPad screen.
“The only light is coming from the iPad,” Hall said. “I’m watching their defense, studying their tendencies. I watched some film, visualizing making plays.”
This is the story of perhaps the greatest game in Colorado high school football history. One week later, it’s still hard to fathom all that happened in the Class 5A championship game — the return, the run, the coach’s call, the second coach’s call — all of it as dizzying as Hall was with the ball.
Cherry Creek 25, Valor Christian 24.
Before Valor, there was Creek, this indomitable football force. But the Bruins hadn’t won a state title in football since 1996, so they snatched up The Fixer, Dave Logan, the coach who wins wherever he goes. Earlier this fall, Cherry Creek defeated Valor Christian — .
Valor Christian, you see, was preordained, a nascent school blessed with incredible facilities and talent (and more talent), having won five consecutive state titles heading into last weekend’s championship game. The rematch was played on the field where the Valor quarterback’s dad played: Sports Authority Field at Mile High.
“People are saying it’s one of the greatest games they’ve ever seen,” Cherry Creek athletic director Jason Wilkins said, “let alone that it happened in a championship game.”
Barrel boy
Harry Fontneau letters in fandom.
“I was not blessed with the athletic genes in my family,” the Valor sophomore explained, “so I really invest myself into being a fan.”
Call him “the barrel boy.” Inspired by the , Fontneau wears a blue-painted barrel around his body to each Valor game. He’s shirtless too — except for that one time it snowed. “The administration of our school made me put on a shirt so I wouldn’t freeze to death,” he lamented.
On Twitter during the week, some Valor students used the hashtag “#sixpeat,” a haughty assertion that Valor would win again. But, as Fontneau explained, “We’d just came off that really big win against Grandview, and my opinion was that Grandview was a much better team than Creek. We had all this momentum.”
Lisa McCaffrey and her husband, Ed, made the drive they had so often, be it for Ed’s Broncos games in his last season of 2003, or for the Valor state title games played by her two older sons. This November day, her boy Dylan was quarterbacking the Eagles, but as they pulled into the parking lot, Lisa could only laugh, awed by the “sea of Creek fans.”
Up in the press box, radio announcer Will Petersen was on his first-ever assignment broadcasting football. He had just called the 4A title game, and it had been a windy morning, so the glass was closed in the press box. But minutes before Creek-Valor kicked off, the windows were opened. “And you could tell right then,” he said. “There was a little chill in the air. You could hear the students very loud — we were above the Creek students — and that’s when it was like, OK, this is a big deal. You had a vibe that it would be a really good game.”
Wouldn’t you know? Hall felt awful. He was sick from eating too much Thanksgiving food the two days prior, as well as a big “breakfast of champions” on Saturday morning. By kickoff, Creek’s best player was nauseous, his head pounding. At halftime, he threw up.
After a scoreless first quarter, Cherry Creek began to assert control, its defense dominant and Hall finding some running room. It took a 10-3 halftime lead and drove early in the third quarter to the Valor 1-yard line.
And Hall fumbled.
“They could have gone up 17-3 — instead, Valor made it 10-10 in the third, and then went up 17-10 in the fourth,” Petersen said. “So it was kind of like — oh, man, that Milo Hall fumble is what we’re going to remember from this game.”
The fourth quarter was absurd. It would have made for a bad Hollywood script. There were too many improbable back-and-forth plays for this to be believable.
Down 17-10, Creek quarterback Joe Caplis unleashed a pass to Joseph Parker for 52 yards, and Caplis then ran for a 1-yard touchdown. The title game was tied, 17-17, with 5:49 left.
In the stands, the barrel boy pumped up the crowd, and Lisa McCaffrey bit her nails.
Rambo’s big return
His name is Danny Rambo, which is cool enough, but Lisa McCaffrey said he goes by “Cowboy” Rambo, which is the name of names. It even eclipses that of Danny’s older brother, , who will play on the same field Sunday, for the Buffalo Bills. Valor’s younger Rambo had already hauled in a Dylan McCaffrey touchdown pass — and there he was again, returning the ensuing kickoff 89 untouched yards, down the right side of the field.
Just like that.
Valor Christian 24, Cherry Creek 17, 5:38 left.
“I was jumping up and down,” Fontneau said, “but the thing is — in the barrel, you don’t have a whole lot of balance. So you’d go really crazy, and somebody would bump into you and you’d fall down when you’re cheering. You could feel the rafters shaking during that play.”
Hall looked over at Cowboy Rambo and Valor’s celebration. “(It) put a little smirk on my face. I knew we needed a big play, and we needed it fast.”
Hall was already a success story. A senior, he is considering college football after graduation. He and three siblings were raised in Park Hill by a single mother. And Hall spent the fall playing for his big brother, Dashae Armstrong, who was in a hospital, recovering from two gunshot wounds, the result of gang violence in north Denver.
“Milo took a different lifestyle from what I did,” Armstrong last month from his hospital bed. “It took a lot of strength for him to do that.”
And here was Milo, 29 seconds after Rambo’s return, having returned the kickoff near midfield, and now receiving a toss in the backfield from Caplis, .
“Shoot,” Hall said, retelling the story. “The safety came flying over the top to make the tackle, and I kind of just stopped and let him run by. Then Brian Dawkins Jr. was diving at me, but I extended my arm to stiff-arm him. And then, a defensive lineman took a bad angle, so I stopped, and he ran out of bounds.
“But the safety I made miss on the first play, he came at me again. He kind of grabbed my face mask, and that turned my momentum backward to back-peddle — into the end zone.”
At 3 a.m., Hall couldn’t have daydreamed this. It was a spinning, spellbinding sprint of 24 yards. As long as football is played at Cherry Creek, they’ll tell the story of Milo Hall’s touchdown run.
Logan turns gambler
Six days later, he was asked, as if it had been an out-of-body experience, “Can you believe you did that?”
“You know,” said Dave Logan, his hoarse voice starting to again sound like Dave Logan, “it was not characteristic of me. I’m more of a play-the-percentages guy.”
Hall’s touchdown run cut Valor’s lead to 24-23 with 5:09 left. Three touchdowns scored in a 40-second span. The extra point would tie the game.
And the face mask Hall mentioned? That earned a 15-yard penalty to be assessed on the kickoff … except, a special high school rule allows the penalty to be assessed, instead, on the point after touchdown.
“Holy crap,” the broadcaster Petersen suddenly thought to himself. “They’re going for the win.”
Logan went for two.
A two-point conversion would have originally been snapped at the 3-yard line — but because of the penalty, it was snapped 1½ yards from the end zone. The Bruins’ bruiser back, D.J. Luke, smashed his way across the goal line, making it 25-24.
“I felt like we had a little momentum. It was just a gut instinct,” said Logan, who was going for a state title with a record fourth school. “Here’s a chance, instead of tying this game up, that we can actually play with the lead. I just had faith in the kids.”
Creek held Valor after the ensuing kickoff, forcing a punt.
Creek, sure enough, soon faced a fourth-down decision of its own.
Logan, again! Disdaining a punt on fourth-and-1 near midfield, he called on Caplis, who picked up the first down. Creek then ran the clock to the final eight seconds, giving Valor one last play.
“Snap to McCaffrey!” Petersen barked into the microphone. “There’s a flag down. Lee Jr. has it, he cuts across the middle, looking for a lateral, he throws it across the field, it’s picked off by a Cherry Creek player who’s tackled. Depending on the flag, Cherry Creek’s your state champion. … We’ve got to wait and see on the laundry! The officials are getting together, Creek’s going crazy, their flag man is out on the center of the field. Here’s the call from the official — it’s an illegal formation of Valor Christian, and for the first time since 1996, the Cherry Creek Bruins are state champions!“
When it was over, the barrel boy Fontneau waited by the players’ tunnel, standing proudly to greet his valiant Valor classmates. He received some verbal jabs from Creek students, who mentioned the “sixpeat.” In the locker room, Valor coach Rod Sherman spoke to his team about the lessons of peaks and valleys. Lisa and Ed McCaffrey then took Dylan to Pappadeaux Seafood Kitchen. The family had gone there after the previous two title games. Dylan was solemn, his mom said, facing the reality that his was the first Valor team to lose a title game.
Last Sunday morning, Ed McCaffrey boarded a private flight with, sure enough, Dave Logan. They are the Broncos’ radio broadcasters, and they took a prop plane to Kansas City to call the Broncos vs. the Chiefs.
“Eddie was very gracious,” Logan said. “We talked about the game, his sons, the players. … Both teams played their guts out.”
Milo Hall? He spent much of Saturday night at the home of D.J. Luke. The two running backs and other teammates rewatched the game and cheered like they didn’t know what was going to happen.
Benjamin Hochman: bhochman@denverpost.com or
