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First Posted: 11/13/2013 Just past the midway point of the high school football season, the teams for the District 2 Class 2A championship game were penciled in.
It was going to be Lake-Lehman, nearly everyone&#8217;s preseason favorite, against upstart Carbondale, which was rolling through its schedule as well.
Then Lakeland showed up last Friday with a big eraser and rubbed out the Chargers from the equation.
So at 7 p.m. today, it will be Lakeland (7-4) that will be at Lake-Lehman (10-1) to decide which team advances to play the District 11 champion next weekend.
Lakeland coach Jeff Wasilchak wasn&#8217;t surprised his Chiefs avenged a 27-0 loss to Carbondale in the regular season last Friday with a come-from-behind 13-9 victory.
&#8220;Before that first game, Carbondale was on a roll and riding their shutout streak,&#8221; said Wasilchak, whose team became Carbondale&#8217;s fourth consecutive shutout victim. &#8220;Our kids had only three games under their belts. We were starting three sophomores on the offensive line at that point. We did some different things later in the year, not in terms of schemes but in shifting people around and making some adjustments.
&#8220;Hopefully, we&#8217;ve gotten a little better since then.&#8221;
It shouldn&#8217;t surprise anyone that Wasilchak managed to get his team into the D2-2A title game. The Chiefs have been there three times in his six years at the school, including a 20-7 loss to Wyoming Area last year. And while Lakeland is 0-3 in those title contests, Wasilchak found plenty of success in his tenure at Lackawanna Trail, winning seven D2-A championships.
As for Lehman, the last time it played for a district championship, many of the current players weren&#8217;t even on the planet. The few that were obviously were too young to have any recollection of the 21-20 overtime victory at Montrose in a driving snowstorm in 1997.
Still, the focus has been on the veteran Black Knights all season, even after they were tripped up by Old Forge 13-7 in their season opener.
&#8220;You know the Lakeland coaches are going to tell their kids they&#8217;re the underdogs,&#8221; Lehman coach Jerry Gilsky said. &#8220;We&#8217;re going to treat this game like nobody has a record.&#8221;
Lehman rushed for only 71 yards when it defeated Montrose in 1997. That&#8217;s less than a quarter&#8217;s work for this group of Black Knights. They have two 1,000-yard rushers in bulldozing senior fullback Dustin Jones (1,599, 24 TDs) and speedy sophomore wingback Joey Vigil (1,253, 12 TDs), who attacks the perimeter. Senior tailback Brady Butler (544, 4 TDs) offers a a little more speed but a little less power than Jones between the tackles.
The Black Knights&#8217; offense is top-heavy with running plays. They have run the ball 502 times this year while passing on just 48 occasions. Knowing what an opponent is going to do and stopping it are two different things.
&#8220;It&#8217;s not easy to defend them because they are really good at what they do,&#8221; Wasilchak said. &#8220;They have that offense down to a science. First of all, it&#8217;s a tough offense to defend in the first place. When someone runs it as well as they do, it makes it even tougher.&#8221;
Lakeland has a little more balance on offense, but still runs the ball about 80 percent of the time. First-year starting quarterback Chet Anuszewski has thrown for 1,003 yards, with Gavin O&#8217;Donnell (26 rec., 376 yds., 3 TDs) the top receiver for a second consecutive year. Running back Chris Roche went over 1,000 yards once again, but his overall production is off pace from last year.
&#8220;They are a lot like us,&#8221; Gilsky said. &#8220;They run a lot of power sets offensively. A lot of two-tight sets to get you off balance. Typical Lakeland where they want to keep the game close, eat up the clock and win it at the end like us.&#8221;

Running toward a title