Marist 27, Lovett 7

“He’s our workhorse, and he knows it,” said Marist quarterback Sam Phelts, who had 96 yards and a touchdown of his own on 11 carries. “Every time we give him the ball, we know he’s going to get multiple yards, 3 or 4 yards every play. And then he’ll bust one loose.”

He rarely ran for long, but the short ones did plenty of damage.

That was especially true on the key drive of the game, a methodical 13-play, 87-yard march that took up 6:30 of the third quarter, ending with a 5-yard Gipson touchdown run that gave the Eagles (2-0) a 14-7 lead they would not relinquish.

It proved to be the first of three consecutive scoring drives for the Marist offense, which just kept leaning on Lovett’s smaller defense until it broke.

“That’s just what we do,” Marist coach Alan Chadwick said. “That’s the kind of football team we’ve got this year. We’re not going to razzle and dazzle a lot of things, just play hard-nosed football. We felt like we had a little bit of an advantage with our size.”

It showed during the last quarter and a half, as Marist scored 20 unanswered points without throwing a single pass, running 29 times for 199 yards during that closing stretch.

That included a 44-yard touchdown scamper by Phelts and a 13-play drive to close the game out. On that drive, 11 of the plays went to Gipson, who had 40 yards and capped off the drive with another score to put Marist up 27-7 with just over 1 minute left.

The game gave the Eagles a measure of vengeance for last season, when Lovett used a eome-from-behind 41-38 double-overtime win over Marist as a springboard to the Lions’ first state title since 1970.

The Eagles never forgot that defeat over the ensuing year, and this night had been circled on their calendar for quite awhile.

“We wanted it badly, there’s no question about that,” Chadwick said. “It’s something that stuck in our craw all season – a game where we had two 14-point leads and still lost it. That was good motivation for our kids this week.”