Their minds were willing, but their bodies, little by little, began to betray them at the worst possible time.
A Center Grove offense that had bullied Ben Davis for 378 yards rushing just a week earlier managed just 144 yards on the ground and 217 overall in Friday’s loss to Carmel in the Class 6A state championship football game.
Meanwhile, the Trojans’ defense, which yielded just 132 of offense in the first half and forced a record six turnovers on the night gave up 239 yards in the second half, allowing the Greyhounds to put together a go-ahead drive that lasted 16 plays and 87 yards late in the fourth quarter.
The state’s best team almost all season long, Center Grove had a frustrating finale, one in which it was unable to do the things it had become accustomed to doing for much of the year.
Clearly, the underdog Greyhounds had a lot to do with that. With the exception of the final six minutes of the teams’ regular-season meeting, when the Trojans put up two late touchdowns in a 19-6 victory, Carmel’s defense held Center Grove in check better than anyone else this year.
But fatigue also was a factor.
Center Grove entered the final weekend of the season ranked first in the state’s Sagarin ratings. It wound up playing the No. 2 (Warren Central), No. 3 (Ben Davis) and No. 4 (Carmel) teams in those rankings twice each during its 14-game season — facing those three teams in succession in the regional, semistate and state final.
The Trojans didn’t just face the most grueling schedule in the state. They may have played the toughest schedule in the country.
"We were just trying to survive," Center Grove coach Eric Moore said. "Going from Warren to Ben Davis was a big feat, and it may have taken so much out of us, we could never recover."
Some of Moore’s players were either reluctant or unwilling to use that as an excuse — senior offensive lineman Clay Hadley conceded that the team was worn down, but insisted that "it just comes down to blocking and tackling."
Others were more willing to acknowledge the toll that a difficult slate of games had taken on their bodies.
"I just feel like we just kind of ran out of gas," senior running back Titus McCoy said. "And it stinks, because we put our whole life into this. And I know my brothers would do anything for me, and I’d do anything for them, and that’s what makes this loss even tougher. We had it, and we know we were capable of it."
On almost any other week, that likely would have been the case. Center Grove had won 12 games in a row against that gauntlet of a schedule, and it had been downright dominant in consecutive postseason victories against Columbus North, Warren Central and Ben Davis. With a little extra rest, things might have been different against a Carmel team that played the same Metropolitan Interscholastic Conference schedule in the regular season but had a significantly easier playoff path.
There was no rest for the weary, though — and that statement isn’t limited to this year. The Trojans have made six consecutive semistate appearances, so this wasn’t their first long journey. A team that reached four straight 6A state finals would play a maximum of 56 games.
In the last four years, Center Grove has played 54.
"These seniors tonight, some of them have started about 45 games," Moore noted. "That’s a lot. That’s a lot of miles on kids, and I saw it tonight. Saw it in their eyes in the first quarter, where it’s like that old ’52 Ford — you can wind her up to nine grand, and sometime she doesn’t go as fast as she used to. And tonight, they were kind of like that.
"It was nothing about effort, though; we gave it everything we had."
On Friday, the everything that Center Grove had left wasn’t quite enough. Still, the senior class that was part of four semistate teams, reached two state title games and won the 2015 championship with a 14-0 record departs having left quite a legacy.
They just weren’t ready for things to end the way they did.
"It was definitely a journey," senior offensive lineman Nick Davis said. "We grew so close as the season went by, and of course we played so long into the postseason, which got us even closer. It’s hard to say goodbye to it all. We’re going to be good friends forever, but that makes it so much harder to let it go."
