Photo: Running back Sam Ames, number 10, carries the ball for Northampton High School in the fall of 1995.
Twenty-five years ago this fall, a jury acquitted O.J. Simpson. The Cleveland Browns announced they were moving to Baltimore.
The Washington Post and The New York Times published the Unabomber’s manifesto. The Million Man March was held in Washington D.C.
But none of that mattered much to me in the fall of 1995. I was covering for the Eastern Shore News every game of Northampton High School’s football team, and trying to imagine how good the team could be.
There was a lot of sports news that fall. Cal Ripken Jr. broke Lou Gehrig’s consecutive-games record. The Carolina Panthers and Jacksonville Jaguars played their first-ever games.
But I was more attuned to local sports. And as Northampton’s season wore on, and the wins piled up, the I found myself living for Friday nights, the cool fall air and the sounds of whistles and cheering.
This year, because of the coronavirus pandemic, there is no fall high-school football, no whistles and no cheering. There’s a plan to hold fall sports games beginning Dec. 28.
In the meantime, I’m going to blog each week about one of my favorite high-school football seasons, a quarter-century after Northampton High reached the doorstep of winning it all.
In all, it lasted exactly 99 days, from Friday, Sept. 1 to Saturday, Dec. 9, 1995, from the first game to the state championship game. No public-school Eastern Shore football team in the last quarter-century has done as well.
If you think I’m shamelessly nostalgic, you’re right. This was my school, my county, my community.
I’d graduated from Northampton four years earlier, and school still was filled with the grand group of educators who taught me.
The players were good men and good athletes, and altogether nice people. The coaches were community pillars.
The head coach, Jimmy Conrow, was the living, breathing epitome of what I thought teachers and coaches were.
At that point in my journalism career, I’d interviewed two governors, covered a plane crash, and wrote stories all over the Eastern Shore.
But I was always nervous interviewing Conrow and writing about the team. He was very nice to me and did things the right way, and I didn’t want to let him down. I’ve often wondered whether he had the same effect on his players.
He was the type of person you naturally wanted to work hard for.
The team itself seemed like an all-star group — size, speed, quickness, smarts. The year before, Northampton only lost two regular-games and barely lost its playoff game.
Graduating seniors from the 1994 team included quarterback Nathan Travis and receiver Muneer Moore, who would be a standout at the University of Richmond.
With so much talent gone, I was eager to see how the team would fare during the season’s first game, a Sept. 1, 1995, contest at Franklin High School, 93 miles away.
It wasn’t much of a game. Northampton won, 45-8. Running back Sam Ames had 133 yards rushing and Jamel Satchell, who had missed most of the previous year with a knee injury, had two interceptions and a fumble recovery.
Next up would be Northampton’s home opener against Delaware’s Seaford High School, set for Sept. 8, 1995.
Seaford’s football team had been 19-4 the previous two seasons and was the defending conference champs. Ron Dickerson had been Seaford’s head coach for 23 seasons, and he didn’t lose much.
A quarter-century ago, a fascinating high-school football season was underway in Eastville.
Time to wait for another Friday night.