WHAT’S CAUSING ALL THIS? / By MITCH LUCAS | No win, no escape… No way out. But maybe there was a building block
ARLINGTON – Well, sometimes it’s just not your day.
That doesn’t mean it wasn’t your year.
Friday was one of those days for the Kilgore High School Bulldogs, like when you get caught in traffic on the way to work, you wait in line for lunch and it’s cold when you get it, you check the bank and realize your credit card payment is due the same day as your car AND your mortgage, and you’re reminded before you go to bed that you have to be at an appointment first thing the next morning and have a function you can’t miss.
On a rainy Monday night.
In November, or something.
Everybody in attendance for Kilgore’s 55-21 loss to Celina in the UIL Class 4A-Division I State Championship Game here on Friday felt like all of those things, while having a bad hair day, with two hangnails, in the middle of a tsunami.
It was an awful feeling.
For about two and a half hours. Until I remembered something, something about 21 years ago.
Here’s the truth: it was a loss. It was an overwhelming loss. It was a loss that ended something, sure – it was the final time in the 2024 season that the Kilgore Bulldogs will play football. It was the final time for the careers of the class of 2025, for them to take the field wearing those jerseys. It was the final – the final.
Final.
But maybe it can be more than that.
Maybe it can be the START of something, too.
I’ve been here a long time. Just look at my hair. When I got here, back in summer, 2002, it was sandy-brown. R.E. St. John Memorial Stadium was getting turf put down – like the week I got here.
George W. Bush was the President.
And the second season I was here, the 2003 football season, Kilgore football was in great hands, the hands of coach Mike Vallery. It had good leaders – players like Clint Toon, Jess Todd, Billy (now Bill!) Slagle, and more. That team beat Henderson in the first-ever playoff meeting between the two rivals. They beat Wylie at Texas Stadium. They went 12-2, the best record a Kilgore team had put together since the late 1980s.
And they lost to Highland Park in the fourth round of the playoffs at Rose Stadium.
It was a heartbreaking loss, but of a different kind: Highland Park didn’t really taunt anybody.
The Rose Stadium scoreboard did that all by itself.
Just like Friday at AT&T Stadium.
That loss to Highland Park, to Matthew Stafford, to Clayton Kershaw, to the Scots, after all Kilgore had built – it hurt. Like really badly.
Toon, Todd, several others were seniors. That was what was so painful, seeing how close they were to breaking through. And we felt if Kilgore won that day, little would be standing between the Bulldogs and the state championship.
But guess what?
Something else happened that day.
It was the final game for a phenomenal class of Kilgore athletes. It was a down-in-a-blaze-of-glory game, to be sure.
But it was also fuel. It was fuel that would be used by all of those players who came back the next season: fuel for Eddie Jones. Fuel for Wayne Daniels, for Britt Mitchell, for Antonio Kelly.
Fuel for… Nick Sanders.
It was that loss that emboldened the NEXT Kilgore team – yep, the 2004 Kilgore Bulldogs – to not slip the next year, to remember how rough that feeling was; a loss that spurned them on to what we now point back to as the greatest Kilgore season ever.
And it was born in the ashes of defeat.
Fast-forward to this fall. Opportunity knocked at Kilgore’s door all year, and the Bulldogs answered that door on 16 occasions. Three times, Kilgore fell short on the scoreboard.
But there was a district championship. There were not one but TWO wins over Kilgore’s biggest rival as of late, Chapel Hill. There was a nine-game winning streak that had the Ragin’ Red right here, at AT&T Stadium, for the University Interscholastic League’s Championship Week, and in their third state title game in the history of the program.
And, by the way – there was a win over Carthage.
You know: THAT Carthage. The Carthage that didn’t lose again after falling to Kilgore in the first weekend of the season. The Carthage that celebrated a 10th state title. The Carthage that dominated (go back and watch it) La Vega on Friday.
The Carthage whose quarterback, Jett Surratt, and coach, Scott Surratt, wished Kilgore the best and had nothing but good things to say about Kilgore, and football in East Texas, in the postgame press conference after their win.
This Kilgore team made an IMPRESSION on them.
Kilgore was the only team – the only one – that was good enough to beat Carthage this year.
That, combined with Friday’s defeat at the hands of Celina, are on the opposite ends of the spectrum. But both can do what that loss in the fall of 2003 did.
It can be the spark that starts a very big fire that will begin in August, 2025.
To the players on this 2024 Kilgore team, we say this: thank you. Thank you for taking us all on another wild ride. Thank you for dusting off Chapel Hill, and putting that on the shelf. Thank you for bringing yet another district championship home. Thank you to a senior class that only lost nine games their entire careers. Thank you for 13 wins in a single season. The ONLY two teams in Kilgore history to win more games than you did: that would be the 2004 team and the 2013 team. That’s it.
Kilgore will always be your home, and you’ll always be a Bulldog. You helped lay the foundation AND build the house. Maybe even to put a Jaguar in the garage.
There’s next season. And it’s full of promise. We’ve just gotta wait eight months until it starts.
So, there was no funeral at AT&T Stadium on Friday. There was just another step in the process.
(Mitch Lucas is the editor and publisher of ETBlitz.com.)
