ENOLA — It wasn’t like Greencastle-Antrim’s football didn’t know what was coming Friday night.
Blake Reuter
East Pennsboro is known to be a running football team and that’s what it did, scoring 14 points in the fourth quarter to top the Blue Devils 21-12 in a Mid Penn Colonial game in Enola.
The Panthers (3-1, 3-0 MPC) ran the ball 52 times, split among 8 different ballcarriers, for 227 yards, and passed the ball only four times.
“They did what we thought they’d do,” G-A coach Jason Thurston said. “They ran hard and were tough to tackle — they just kept fighting for yards.”
The game’s only pass completion for East Penn came in the first quarter, a 28-yard pass from Tucker Barlup to Kolton Keys. Greencastle (1-3, 1-2 MPC) made it 12-6 at halftime on a touchdown run by Blake Reuter.
Thurston said, “In the second half, they kicked off three times, all of them pooch kicks over our front line. One went out of bounds, but they recovered two of them. So we lost two possessions because of that and it was a huge momentum swing for them.”
After a scoreless third quarter, the Panthers scored a touchdown to go ahead 14-6. Later, the Blue Devils’ Loki Huffman fell on a fumble at the EP 1 and Reuter scored from there to make it 14-12. A two-point try failed, and East Pennsboro added a late touchdown.
“We made two goal-line stands and we had four takeaways — all on fumbles — so it feels like we should have won that game,” Thurston said. “The kids fought hard; we have good, blue-collar type kids.
“We’re close — we just have to figure out how to stop making mistakes at the wrong time.”
Greencastle had 15 first downs to 11 for EP. Keys ran 9 times for 78 yards and had an interception for the Panthers, and Elliot Bruhn carried 16 times for 79 yards.
Stats for the Blue Devils were not available.