In front of thousands of cheering fans and popping flashbulbs, the Palo Alto High School football team rallied together with the Palo Alto community in raucous celebration three weeks and a day after winning the California Interscholastic Federation state championship.  Coach Earl Hansen rolled through downtown in a green vintage car followed by the title-winning football and volleyball teams.  Players sat perched in the windows of cable cars adorned in green and white streamers and balloons, waving to cheering supporters.  With city and state leaders in attendance, the unbelievable championships were set in stone forever.

The Parade of Champions would not have become reality if the Vikings had just won league, just won the Central Coast Section, just gone 13-0: it was the result of one game.  The Palo Alto High School Vikings’ thirteen games before the CIF Division I championship were exactly that, in the past.  Everything depended on that one game.  It was the end.  The end of football for many seniors.  The end of the season for all.  The end of all predictions, leaving history to be decided by the two teams on the field.

Fans remember the 2007 New England Patriots as the team that lost Super Bowl XLI to the New York Giants in a monumental upset.  They do not think of the Patriots’ record-setting regular season and dominating p
layoff performance leading up to the Super Bowl.  Winning all season is ultimately forgettable if accompanied by
one loss, the championship. If, however, a team manages to take the championship crown, it and all of its players will forever be remembered for the legacy left behind.
For the Vikings, falling to the Centennial Huskies in the CIF Division I championship was expected.
“From what you’ve read in the newspapers, we shouldn’t even bother to show up,” Viking offensive line coach Steve Foug said prior to his team’s trip to Southern California.
Eric Sondheimer, a Los Angeles Times reporter, wrote four days before the showdown that “[Open Division competitors] Servite and De La Salle should be grateful they don’t have to play the best team in the state, which I believe is Centennial. The Huskies are going to put on a show and expose what everyone knows is a flaw in the CIF state championship bowl system – it doesn’t produce a true state champion.”
Three hundred seventy four miles away from the Home Depot Center in Carson, Calif., Paly supporters packed The Old Pro to show support for Palo Alto football.  At halftime, they watched as Comcast SportsNet aired a segment showing Centennial players, frustrated that they did not reach the Open Division game. They felt that they were settling for a Division I championship over lowly Palo Alto.  Few, if any, expected the Vikings to be up 15-0 on a team with the most prolific offense in state history.
While Centennial brooded in thoughts of missing out on the big show, Paly saw an opportunity and came out firing.
But there is an upside that comes with being an underdog: you get overlooked and underestimated.  There was nothing to lose; either the Vikings would lose as anticipated to the No. 5 team in the nation (MaxPreps), or they would win and upset the highly-acclaimed Huskies, shocking the high school football world.
With everything to gain, they did it, holding off a furious Centennial comeback effort.
“I wasn’t scared or nervous at the end of the game because I didn’t have time,” Paly defensive coordinator Jake Halas said.  “My body and mind at times were in slow motion.  I did, however, keep looking at the clock and that thing was not moving as fast as I would like.”
The game came down to the small things: the mistakes, the penalties, the injuries, the safety.  The Vikings held a team that had averaged 54.1 points a game (and never scored fewer than 42) to just 13 and blocked a potential game-winning kick with 35 seconds left to secure the state crown.
“When you’re in a game like that you don’t realize that if this [kick] goes in, we lose, if he doesn’t make it, we win,” Stanford University-bound lineman Kevin Anderson (’11) said.  “You’re not really thinking like that, it’s just too fast.”

The Vikings won, to Centennial’s surprise, against experts’ predictions and despite rankings – all because of the team’s skill and heart.

“If it’s Palo Alto vs. Centennial on paper, it’s a no brainer [that] Centennial is going to blow them out.  That’s what everybody figured,” Halas said.  “They have bigger, stronger, faster players, supposedly.  They have all these numbers, but you can’t gauge the heart [my] kids have.  You can’t gauge what our [78] practices were and the work we put in.”

When they needed the big hit, Anderson gave the crowd plenty of “did you see that” moments.  Just ask Barrinton Collins (’11).  The Husky star running back took a handoff inside the five-yard line in the second quarter, only to take the full brunt of an Anderson tackle and be sidelined for the rest of the game.

The Viking defense, which earned the moniker “the swarm” eight games into the season, relied on speed and gang-tackling to overwhelm ball carriers and pressure quarterbacks.  Never was the bend-but-don’t-break attitude more evident than in that final game, when Paly stuffed Centennial on fourth-and-goal. Twice.

The dominating Paly unit held opposing offenses to a stingy 9.6 points per game, allowing no more than 20 in any single contest.

The man behind the proverbial curtain was Halas, who joined the Paly football and teaching community with the seniors, just four years ago.

“He is the genius behind the defense,” Anderson said.  “To come in and stop the best offense in the history of California, is all on him. He gave us a game plan and we were able to go out there and execute it. Without him, I guarantee they would have been able to score more points.”

Not even Halas believed his defense would accomplish what it did.

“Did I think we would hold them to 13 points? No way,” he said.  “But I knew we were going to hold them down, we were going to disrupt them, slow their tempo, and for that it’s that group of kids.  I mean these kids are state champs.  Can you believe that?”

The state championship game wasn’t the first time Paly won against the odds. In fact, the team did just that all postseason long.  Throughout the 2010 Central Coast Section playoffs, sentiment always seemed to be “Paly had a nice season, but it has no chance in this one.”  Week after week, so-called experts overlooked Paly, while favoring its West Catholic Athletic League opponents.

“It fires everyone up when people think that we’re going to get killed,” quarterback Christoph Bono (’11) said.  “It helped us prepare and work harder.  If everyone expects you to lose, then you have nothing to lose.”

The games weren’t always easy, but what mattered was the final score, the final tackle, the final catch, the final team standing.

In its second match-up of the season against WCAL powerhouse Archbishop Mitty, Paly struggled, something that it wasn’t too familiar with this season.  Trailing 10-6 late in the fourth quarter, Bono took a sack on third and goal.  Fourth-and-goal from the 24-yard line loomed.  The clock showed 35 seconds left. Surely they were finished and the glory of their 10-0 record in regular season play would fade away fast.

“I believed we had a chance [to win], I was just freaking out a little bit that it could’ve been my last play and I didn’t want it to end,” outside linebacker Michael Cullen (’11) said.

With the season hanging in the balance, Bono took a three-step drop and looked left.  Six-foot two wideout Davante Adams (’11) had one-on-one coverage on the outside.  Bono tossed a prayer to Adams, who appeared to haul it in before being knocked to the turf by the Mitty defender.  Seconds ticked by.  No signal from the ref.  Four seconds later, touchdown.  Victory.  Upset.

“It was like a near-death experience,” linebacker Will Glazier (’11) said.  “It felt like we were living on borrowed time.”

Pandemonium ensued, as the depleted and soggy student section rushed from the bleachers ecstatically and the Vikings lived to fight another day.

Bono proved that there is more to a football player than physical attributes.

“I’m not the biggest, I’m not the fastest, but I’m a winner,” Bono said.

From that point on, it seemed meant to happen.

Paly carried all the momentum into a 35-0 romp over Bellarmine College Preparatory, turning the tables on last year’s match-up.  Finally, the Vikings defeated WCAL powerhouse Valley Christian 21-14 to bring home the CCS Open Division crown for the first time since 2006.  A perfect 13-0 season, that was not yet perfect.

Rewind.  Before the success, before the glory, players sacrificed.  They skipped summer vacations to work out in 100-degree weather, suffered cuts and bruises, sore shoulders.  Players were forced to adjust, especially after the Homecoming game against Homestead High School.  Five players were sidelined, handicapped by the Mustangs.  Three torn MCLs, one sprained ankle, one broken hand and one turning point of the season.

“Immediately after watching the [Homestead game] it was really depressing,” center Jackson Moses (’11), who broke his hand in the battle against the Mustangs, said.  “But after that happened I think our team became closer because everybody stepped up to fill in the spots until those guys who were hurt recovered and came back.”

Two weeks later, the regular season culminated in a 14-point comeback victory over Saratoga High School, completing the perfect league season.

While it was the players who executed on the gridiron to win league, head coach Earl Hansen’s efforts did not go unnoticed.  In his 23rd year as the Paly football coach, he won the ESPN RISE Cal-Hi Sports State Football Coach of the Year for the first time in Paly’s history.

And in the end it came down to the two groups, players and coaches, working seamlessly in unison.  On an undersized, unrecognized, underrated team, brains proved greater than brawn.  The Vikings practiced as one, played as one, won as one and celebrated as one.

Fourteen times, Paly put its undefeated season on the line, and fourteen times it remained unscathed.  For 14 weeks, Moses had an excuse to let his beard grow bushier.

Back at the Parade of Champions in downtown Palo Alto, players basked in the public spotlight one last time together.  At one point in a joint speech by Bono and Glazier, the quarterback thanked backup center Jose Tochez (’11) for “living the dream.”  As the images on the screen started to fade, the festivities ended with a clip from the team’s rendition of Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream.”  The CIF state champions went out in style, rolling down the heart of downtown, reveling in their record-shattering season while uniting the Palo Alto community.

“It’s a history-making record for Paly and it will always be there,” Hansen said.  “That’s as many games as [a Paly football team will] probably ever play. People can only tie it.”