We Are The Champions, Local High School Edition

Against most if not all of the odds, Moraga's Campolindo High School, Kelly's alma mater to be, won the North Coast Section football championship at the Oakland Coliseum on Saturday night. Campo, projected to finish last in its own league, continued a true Cinderella season by knocking off heavily favored Marin Catholic 20-18 on a last-second field goal to go 14-0 on the season.

We managed to watch the last part of the game through a video feed online (the internet age is great for this sort of thing), and were able to witness our local boys work for the winning score after giving up their game-long lead with only two minutes to go. Campo had stopped Marin on fourth and two at Campo's 10-yard line halfway through the fourth quarter, but allowed Marin to go the length of the field on the next drive to set up a go-ahead field goal. On that drive, Marin survived a fourth-and-eight play, but also dropped a pass in the end zone. Campo returned the ensuing kickoff well to about their 35 yard line, but still had to go the length of the field with two minutes left and their starting center out of the game with an injury. On the first play, Marin had Campo's quarterback in their grasp, but he wriggled free, running for his sporting life to his left. Stunningly, he found a teammate (the older brother of a boy with whom Michael plays baseball) 45 yards down the field to immediately put Campo in position for a game-winning field goal. Campo milked the clock with a series of runs to put the game on the shoulders of the sophomore kicker. After a timeout with two seconds remaining in the game, enduring what had to be the highest-stakes moment the kicker had ever experienced, he coolly put the ball through the uprights, setting off a joyous celebration among the team, their families and fans.

Kelly, who has no real love of football, got an unexpected charge out of the winning kick. As it turns out (but she had not figured out until she heard his name announced on the webcast), the kicker is not only in her biology class, he is her lab partner. We went to one home game earlier this season, which she did not find all that interesting, but stuff like this could make a girl start to enjoy football a little bit more.

Campo has won NCS before, but not since 1986. To put that in perspective, that was when I was a junior in high school. Our football teams were terrible in those days, though, so I didn't pay too close attention at the time to what anyone else did (although I did go to the CCS final game in 1984 with a friend to watch his St. Francis beat Bellarmine 5-3 at San Jose State ... and Bellarmine is the CCS champion this year). With Kelly now a freshman, it truly has been a generation since Campo last reached this lofty height.

The magical season is not quite over. With its win, Campo earned a trip to the Division III state championship game in Los Angeles. Campo will match up with Washington-Union of Fresno ... the city where Kelly was born. We might have to figure out a way to watch this game.