"Five... four... three... two... one... AND THE STREAK HAS BEEN BROKEN!"
Today's feel-good story opening comes from the Brainerd Dispatch, which reported on the Staples-Motley Cardinals winning their first football game since 2010 over the weekend.
Here goes:
"Travis VanOverbeke enjoyed his first celebratory speech as a Staples-Motley head coach. The second year coach even quoted rapper Ice Cube saying, 'Today was a good day.' That's because the Cardinals snapped a 39-game losing streak - the longest in the state - with Friday's 24-14 Midwest Blue Subdistrict victory over the Frazee Hornets in front of an appreciative home crowd."
And here's the radio call of the final seconds from Joshua Miron on Wadena radio station KSKK.
Over the years, the central Minnesota school has been known more for winning. Its teams have made appearances at the state basketball and tennis tournaments, so seeing the Cardinals on the other end of things is odd. But it's something that happens at many small schools in the cyclical nature of high school sports.
In the late 1970s, Motley High School (before the two towns came to share a single high school) brought attention to a conference opponent by beating Nevis High 96-0, which sent the Minneapolis Tribune (before the Star and the Tribune became a single newspaper) to Nevis for a story about how winning is only a dream for some schools. (The Tribune was also on hand when Nevis broke its streak two years later. The team's coach called the newspaper and pretty much guaranteed his team was going to snap the streak that afternoon.)
Last year, during ther fourth season of the streak, the Star Tribune columnist Jon Tevlin wrote about the team.
After Friday's game, VanOverbeke told the Dispatch about talking to his team after the game: "That felt pretty good to be a little energetic rather than having a somber moment."
Junior Matt Miller was one of the game's stars. He scored on a 60-yard run to open the second half and returned an interception 80 yards for a touchdown with about 4 1/2 minutes left in the game.
About scoring the final touchdown, Miller said: "It was a really good feeling. It was a great feeling. That big of a lead was something we hadn't had before."
On Friday, the Cardinals will try for a winning streak at Osakis, which lost 57-0 to Otter Tail Central last Friday.
You can read the full report from the Brainerd newspaper here.
