LAKE OSWEGO — Second-ranked Lake Oswego spent much of the second half of Friday night’s Three Rivers League football showdown with dangerous West Linn groping around in its quiver for that one last arrow that would get rid of the Lions once and for all.
The Lakers (5-1, 2-0) found it in the form of a numbingly efficient 86-yard drive that ate up nearly all of the fourth quarter, kept the clock moving, resulted in a late touchdown and had everything to do with a 41-28 win.
The No. 7 Lions (4-2, 1-1) will see the game in the film room Saturday as a huge missed opportunity. They fought back from a 27-7 second-quarter deficit and would have put the Lakers against the wall except for two blown red-zone chances.
The game was a little closer than it looked, then. And it might have been even closer had not the Lakers regained their momentum when they absolutely had to.
Two plays into the fourth quarter, a Lion punt rolled dead at the Laker 14. The Lakers had a 34-21 lead at that point, but all their scoring had been in the first half. The way Lion quarterback Ethan Long was flinging the ball around, and as well as the West Linn defense was playing, 11 minutes was plenty of time to come back.
The Lions never got a legitimate opportunity. The Lakers marched the entire 86 yards — 96 if you count a 10-yard penalty — in 18 plays and scored on Keenan DeRaeve’s one-yard burst out of wildcat formation with 1:41 to go in the game.
That made it 41-21, and made Long’s 21-yard touchdown pass to Casey Tawa with 7.9 seconds left pretty, but irrelevant.
Most of the work on the drive came from junior running back Casey Filkins. That’s as predictable as sunrise. Filkins did a little bit of everything for the Lakers. He ran the ball an unofficial 32 times for 169 yards and a touchdown, did some wildcatting himself at quarterback, spent some time at wide receiver, and punted.
On the key late drive, he ran the ball 11 times for 46 yards and four critical first downs.
Filkins, who is as slippery as they come, was having a ball doing it, too. Almost everything he does is a zone read, in which he gets the ball in the backfield, surveys the landscape ahead of him and finds whatever hole is available.
But to do that, his line had to get in the Lions’ way and shove a few of them out of the way.
“Obviously, you’ve got to credit the line for tonight,” he said. “I mean, that last drive went 18 plays and and 10-and-a-half minutes long, and you can’t do that without great blocking.
“Sometimes my eyes would widen a little bit at the holes I got. Sometimes I had to move around a little to find out where the holes were, but they were always there.”
Lakers coach Steve Coury gave his offensive line some ups, too.
“They played extremely well,” he said. “When you can control the line of scrimmage like that, it helps you make big plays when you need them.”
Coury had even bigger praise for quarterback Jackson Laurent, who unofficially hit 15 of 21 passes for 235 yards and three touchdowns. Eight of those receptions for 131 yards went into the hands of junior wideout Thomas Dukart.
“He’s really playing lights out,” Coury said of Laurent. “He made all the right reads tonight. He works hard and spends a lot of time in the film room. He’s seeing what we’re seeing out there, and that’s hard to find in a high school kid.”
The Lions got three touchdown passes and one on the ground from Long, but will not want to remember two big chances that went south on them.
They drove from their own 33 to a first[-and-goal at the Laker 7 yard line late in the first half, but missed on four straight passes.
They also had a second down on the Laker 12 late in the third quarter, but the subsequent snap went over Long’s head and the Lakers recovered on their own 31.
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