Castleton, Vt.
Jake Cady, the elusive, dart-throwing quarterback from St. Johnsbury Academy, was his usual dominant self during the 3-hour, 45-minute game for graduating senior student-athletes, helping Team North to a 56-35 win over Team South with six touchdowns, four in the air and another two on the ground.
Cady, who surpassed 3,000 yards in his senior season with the Hilltoppers this fall, finished the game 26-for-36 with 442 passing yards and scrambled for another 26 yards in the victory.
North Country’s Alex Haugwitz also threw a touchdown pass in the first quarter, and Mount Mansfield running back Jehric Hackney added a score for North. It was North’s fifth straight victory over South, the 11th all-time since the classic began in 2001 and the fourth straight contest in which it scored 53 points or more.
Rutland running back Dakota Peters scored three rushing touchdowns for South. Hartford’s Nick Porter added a rushing touchdown as a secondary running option behind Peters, and Fair Haven quarterback Cam Coloutti threw a touchdown pass in the loss.
“It was a good game. I was super proud of the South team,” said Windsor head coach Greg Balch, the Team South head coach. “We played hard the whole game. There’s obviously things after every game like this where you think, ‘Ah, I wish we’d done this, I wish we’d done that.’ But I was super proud of them. They’re a great group of kids.”
Cady and Team North wasted no time making things look easy.
The North scored two plays into the game with the St. Johnsbury gunslinger under center on a 56-yard strike to Mount Mansfield’s Harrison Leombruno-Nicholson just 21 seconds in. It scored again two plays into its next possession, taking advantage of a South turnover — a fumble by Peters — with a 29-yard touchdown pass from Haugwitz to Colchester’s Bailey Olsen.
The North took a 21-7 lead — after touchdowns by the South’s Peters and North’s Cady — into the second quarter.
The South then found its groove, scoring on its first two drives of the second quarter, a run by Peters from the 1-yard line and a 6-yard rush by Porter, cutting to the outside left for a walk-in with 4:25 left in the half. Peters’ third touchdown tied the game, 28-28, with 48.3 seconds remaining.
It was plenty of time for Cady, who ran left and threw right against the grain to Rice’s Ryan Byrnes for a 26-yard touchdown connection with 1 second left before intermission. The North led, 34-28, at halftime and outscored the South, 23-7 in the final two quarters.
“In terms of atmosphere, it was great to come out and play with a lot of guys that I’ve played against all four years,” Cady said. “The offense I started on, all the guys are super smart. It was great. I had all the receivers I wanted. They knew what they were doing.”
It was another shot at football for Hartford’s Porter, who said he’s headed to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to play men’s lacrosse next year. The shifty Hurricane running back suffered a sprain of his left ankle midway through Hartford’s regular season and missed two regular-season games. He returned for Hartford’s postseason tilt, a 30-0 loss to Cady and the Hilltoppers, but admittedly wasn’t 100 percent.
Porter played Saturday’s contest with a black brace on his left ankle. He finished the game with 12 rushes for 29 yards, one fumble lost and a score.
“I’m still rusty,” Porter said. “It stinks, being my senior year. But I’m glad I was able to go in for my last game, the playoff game and do the best I could. I’m glad I got to play one more game.
“(The game) was rough. I feel like if we had more time … we were more of a ground-and-pound kind of team. I feel like they just had bigger guys, and they just had more opportunities.”
Hartford’s Nick Cameron, Riley Packard, Colton Schall and Reece Thompson also suited up for Team South, as did Windsor’s Gavin Harriman and Robert Slocum, Woosdtock’s Gabe Marsicovetere and Caden White and Oxbow’s Zachary Koslowsky.
“You get a lot less time with this than you do at Shrine (Maple Sugar Bowl) with the camp,” said Balch, who also served as Vermont’s head coach in last August’s Shrine Game. “It’s fun to watch them. The first day you meet them, they don’t talk to each other. It’s all the cliques of the high schools they come from or kids that are local to one another and know each other. Then, by the end of the week, they’re teammates.
“That’s a blast to watch. It’s as much fun as the coaching part to see them come together like that.”
For Cady, the real work begins. He’s got plenty of options when it comes to playing football in college: Bryant, Central Connecticut and UMass-Amherst among them. With the fall season now over, he’ll have time to think about where his next step may be.
It also was a chance to build some confidence. Cady and the Hilltoppers fell, 48-23, to Rutland in the VPA Division I semifinals. One last chance at a dominant win was a good way to end his varsity career.
“We came out flat. We got down, and we hadn’t played down a lot this year,” Cady said of his team’s performance in the semis. “We had to just throw stuff up and got out of what we usually do.
“They kind of jumped us. It was a tough one. But it was nice to come out here and beat these guys.”
Josh Weinreb can be reached at jweinreb@vnews.com or 603-727-3306.