The moment is still happening on TikTok, if that's allowed where you are. If not, find the moment …
On YouTube. In the ESPN archives. On the CBS, ABC and NBC websites. SI.com, Yahoo.com. Wander through Twitter, you'll trip over it.
New London-Spicer's viral Prep Bowl moment, when a desperate pass led to a desperate lateral and then to a desperate sprint to the end zone and the Class 3A football championship, lives on.
Now it's the 2023 All-Metro Sports Awards Play of the Year.
Coach Chad Gustafson can't avoid it, nor does he care to.
"It comes up for sure every week, if not a few times a week," he said. "If I just go to a different town or out to eat, somebody brings it up."
The details: Dilworth-Glyndon-Felton had taken the lead with 24 seconds left. Four seconds remained when New London-Spicer lined up for the final play, 48 yards from the end zone. The play — New London-Spicer calls it Trips Right 290 All Clear, for the record, and everybody has a version in the playbook — began with quarterback Blake Schultz heaving a pass toward two receivers, with a third nearby. Grant Paffrath caught it (though he wasn't the target, Schultz has admitted), and before he could be tackled he lateraled to Brycen Christensen, who ran 14 yards for the touchdown and a 27-26 victory. Watch it often enough and you'll come to enjoy Mason Delzer, No. 7, thrusting his arms into the air as Christensen breaks away.
The Trips Right 290 All Clear part was planned, and the rest was a collision of instruction and instinct. The players had been told to get rid of the ball before they got tackled. The part where Christensen moves into position to take the lateral, that was "kids being smart and living the moment," Gustafson said.
The play ranked No. 1 on ESPN's top-10 list that day. The naysayers and know-it-alls among the millions who have watched it like to comment on illegal motion, a mouthpiece violation and holding by an offensive lineman as reasons New London-Spicer shouldn't have won.
Gustafson is reminded regularly that his team did win.
"People, when they hear you're from New London-Spicer, they remember," he said. "You're the team that made that play."
Here's another look, using still photos that appeared in the Star Tribune after the Prep Bowl:
