The thing about Firth’s final drive, about the stop Bear Lake needed to seal its 14-6 win in this 2A state championship game Thursday night at Holt Arena, is that it never felt in doubt. It felt inevitable. It felt like, faced with the nigh-impossible task of corralling lightning-quick quarterback Gage Vasquez and all the Cougars’ other playmakers, the Bears never blinked. They never faltered, never hesitated, never abandoned all the ideals that led them on this wondrous journey to begin with.
So after Bear Lake completed the series, jogging off the field after yielding barely 10 yards, the Bears began to celebrate. They hugged each other. They laughed. They looked up at the stands, where most of their town of 6,000 stood in support, soaking in the moment for everything it meant: Bear Lake’s first-ever state championship. A sublime season completed. A win on the stage where the Bears had never been before — but where they danced like their names were all Michael Jackson.
Indeed, they performed so well that it tempted you to forget how these guys were never supposed to be here. To advance to this state championship game, Bear Lake had to defang vaunted West Side — not once, but twice, in two overtime thrillers that probably led to a Prilosec boom in Montpelier — behind a roster that was experienced, just not in the state title orbit. Check out the Bears’ roster and you might feel they had the pieces, from quarterback Tayson Neal to running back Tyler Beresford to jack-of-all trades Toby Flake, but seasoned as they are, nobody in the blue and gray laundry had sniffed a situation that dripped with magnitude like this one.
“I mean, it’s storybook,” Bear Lake coach Ryan Messerly said. “You can watch a movie about this. Bear Lake doesn’t get a ton of press, and we’re OK with that. We wear it on our sleeves. We’ll be the underdog. These kids just worked and worked and worked, and took it one game at a time. I’m so proud of them.”
Bear Lake junior Tyler Beresford goes to the ground after picking up yardage during Thursday's 2A state championship game against Firth.
Kyle Riley/For the Journal
So how did they pull it off? On Thursday night, the magic was in Bear Lake’s defense, in the club’s simplicity. The Bears scored just twice: Once on a 16-yard touchdown pass from Neal to Bryson Crane, a second-quarter score that ended with Beresford turning a botched PAT into an impromptu two-point conversion, and then on a 55-yard screen pass from Neal to Beresford, who just outran everyone, galloping into the end zone for the dagger.
The rest was up to Bear Lake’s defense, which did its part, then a million more things. Dawson Smith made huge tackles, as did Ethan Thoronton, as did so many Bears who put one player in their crosshairs: Gage Vasquez, the Firth quarterback who might be Idaho’s best comparison to Arizona Cardinals quarterback Kyler Murray. Vasquez might not be quite as fast, but he’s dang fast, and he has the same type of escapability that keeps defensive coordinators awake at night, that makes them slam their clipboards in frustration.
Which is what makes Vasquez’s numbers remarkable: 10-for-18 passing for 112 yards and a touchdown, plus 16 carries for 78 yards. Fine numbers, sure, but watch the game and you understood Bear Lake’s defense kept him in check. He opened up a couple longer runs, because a quarterback with speed like that will do that, but the truth is that more often, the Bears dragged him down for shorter gains: Three yards here. One there. Vasquez still darted around, avoiding tackles and ducking others, but the Bears kept him in front by collapsing the pocket, by surrounding him with bodies.
“You go down to fundamentals and trying to take good angles,” Messerly said. “I mean, this game is about angles. So you take a good angle and hope that we can not give him a first down.”
The Bears rarely had to hope. They did it. They corralled Vasquez. They secured the one stop they needed. They scaled the mountaintop that no other Bear Lake team had before. All it took was a season no other team in program history had delivered.
The Bears lost just once all season, a two-point setback to North Fremont in their season-opener. After that, they supplied wins like donuts on a Saturday morning: A shutout of Wyoming’s Lyman, a first win over Firth, a win over West Side for the Pirates’ first loss in three seasons, another win over West Side to scuttle its plans for a four-peat, then this one Thursday night — a validating victory, the most validating in fact, but the Bears did it so convincingly that even when they returned to the field for the one stop they needed to capture this championship, it felt like Neo squaring off with agents at the end of The Matrix. You know what happens next.
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