I hate the “______ weren’t into it” excuse that many fans use. We can all point to times when a team was prime for a letdown for various reasons, and yet they still won. Look, DLS won the earlier match up, and Folsom won the second game…that’s it. There are too many examples to recite where top teams rolled a team early in the season, only to lose to the same team at the end of the season. Folsom v Grant comes to front of my mind.
It happens at every level of sports. No excuses.
I don’t disagree with what you are saying at all, but this is HSFB, not College or NFL and 15-18 year olds can certainly go through emotional ups and downs and that DLS group had two huge punches to the gut that year….
They lost the Nor Cal Streak by 3 points to SF and they were the first DLS team to have to play in D1AA Regional….
If you don’t think that pressure and feeling of failure wouldn’t affect a bunch of 15-18 year old kids, you don’t understand kids…. The coaches certainly knew it and tried everything to get the kids to understand that playing in D1AA was a Great Opportunity they earned and not a failure they had to burden themselves with….
But yes, teams that play twice in a season often split the games and 2021 we saw Rocklin Boat-race Folsom, then Folsom return the favor in the SJS title game…. We also saw SF boat race Serra and Serra squeak by SF in the Section title game…. And of course we see it almost every year with MD and SJB in So Cal….
And who knows, if DLS got a second crack at SF, maybe they clean up the bad turnovers and boat race SF like they did when they played the prior year….
Folsom 100% earned that D1AA Nor Cal Regional Championship on the field that year with a great victory over DLS, I am not saying anything different….
I am just saying that Sometimes both things can be equally true….
