Wisconsin squad scores 82 points, still loses wild football game
It isn't often that a team scores 82 points -- 82! -- and still loses a game. It happened on Friday in Wisconsin, and the deluge of total points that resulted from the matchup set a new state record.
As reported by Living Lake Country and other Wisconsin outlets, Oconomowoc High (Oconomowoc, Wis.) topped Wisconsin Lutheran School (Milwaukee, Wis.) by a final score of 84-82 in the single largest-scoring football game in state history. The 166 combined points topped the state's previous record by 33, and the teams broke through that prior 133-point threshold with nearly eight minutes remaining in the game.
It's worth noting that the 166 points still falls far short of the national record for both single and combined points for a game, which was set in 1926 by Haven High School in Kansas, which beat Sylvia High (Silvia, Ks.) by the preposterous score of 256-0. Of course, that was 87 years ago, so a lot has changed since then.
Fittingly, both teams had individual stars who accounted for almost silly statistics themselves. Oconomowoc quarterback Canton Larson scored eight touchdowns, four through the air and four on the ground, as part of a performance that included 493 total yards. He was countered by Wisconsin Lutheran quarterback Logan McShane, who accounted for six touchdowns himself, four of them on the ground.
Of all the gaudy statistics, the thing that may stand out most about the matchup was just how long it took both teams to get going; Lutheran held a lead of just 8-7 at the end of the first quarter.
"They have some kids that go both ways, and we knew if we kept going, they might get tired at some point," Larson told Living Lake Country. "To be quite honest, it didn't look like they got tired at all. They just kept going and going.
"It's obviously the best game I've ever been a part of," Larson said. "It could have gone either way, and we happened to come out on top. I'm speechless, to be quite honest."
The win was a particularly big one for Oconomowoc, which improved to 6-0 on the season and knocked off Lutheran for the first time since 2002, taking a dominant hold on the Wisconsin Little Ten Conference lead in the process.
That significance has been buried beneath all the points, for good reason. It'll be a long time before any state, let alone Wisconsin, sees this kind of offensive explosion again.
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