MSJ's Real Tradition

Now that the Halloween parade is over & Thanksgiving is moving up fast, I started thinking about the Rutland-MSJ game and the tradition that could've seen its final match-up on the final day of October. With MSJ moving down to D-III next season the possibility of a Rutland-MSJ game next year is pretty slim. That's sad news when you look at the storied history that this one football match-up has brought to Rutland over more than 75 years. It got me thinking about the once huge football rivalry in my hometown in CT. Every Thanksgiving Day for years New Britain High School would play crosstown rival Pulaski High in the annual game. Like Rutland, New Britain was always the bigger school & favored (most years) to win the annual city classic. But that didn't always happen. Like MSJ there were always those years that Pulaski would give NBHS all they could handle and though unlike MSJ, Pulaski would tie but never win the Thanksgiving game, that would all change during my senior year. The year I started high school in 1969 our team would finish with a record of 7-3-0. They went 8-2-0 my junior year, but the year I graduated in 1971 the Golden Hurricane's record was a lowly 2-7-1 and was the first and (I think) only time we would lose to Pulaski. If I remember right it was a last second field goal that beat us by one point. That annual Connecticut match-up didn't have the long history of a Rutland & MSJ but there were strong similarities between both. I remember my first Rutland-MSJ game in the early 90's thinking about how much it reminded me of those New Britain-Pulaski games of the early 70's. The excitement level at St Peter's Field that day brought back an awful lot of hometown football memories for me. Because of declining enrollment through the 70's Pulaski sadly ended its roll as a high school in 1982 and is now a middle school. Today MSJ is suffering a similar drop in enrollment. Here's hoping that dropping down to Division III will begin attracting more students to play as a member of an historic football program, but more importantly in my view to be part of the real tradition at MSJ; being a student of the school itself.