By Craig Juer — Daily Staff Writer

FRONT ROYAL — Relative to where they were last year, the Hawks were sitting pretty.

Trailing just 16-12 in the fourth quarter, with Division 3 power Handley facing a fourth-and-short to keep the ball for the last 49 seconds, Skyline needed to make one more stop and manufacture a tough — but not impossible — scoring drive.

But before the play could even start, it was over.

Handley quarterback Geremi Long barked a loud "Go!" inducing a few Hawks to jump — one of them into the neutral zone, drawing an offsides flag — on a successful "no-play" call.

"That was taught [to me] when I was younger," Long said. "You really scream it, and that usually gets people to jump."

The resulting first down allowed the Judges to kneel down and run out the clock, dashing Skyline's hopes for a homecoming upset and a 6-0 start.

"I wished we could have played [the down] out there," Skyline coach Heath Gilbert said. "But they did a good job with the no-play, getting us to jump offsides. That ended the football game."

It was not the track meet foreshadowed by the teams' second- and third-ranked offenses — Skyline with 383.8 yards per game, Handley with 294 — in the area. The Judges led just 3-0 at halftime, and the Hawks had managed only 10 yards on the ground.

"We didn't bust any big run plays, so we just kind of had to keep driving the ball down the field," said Handley running back Jeremiah Wilson, who finished with 126 yards on 27 carries. "Luckily, our defense stepped up."

The second half saw the Hawks emerge as the first to shake off the rust offensively. Skyline started off from its own 7 on its first possession of the third quarter, but quickly moved down the field when Cliff Woodard gashed the Judges for a 37-yard run up the middle. Andrew Thorne hauled in a 47-yard rainbow from Nathaniel White on the next play, and the Hawks punched it in two plays later on a 5-yard run by Woodard.

"We knew Andrew Thorne was going to get his no matter what," Long said of the area's leading receiver, who finished with four catches for 100 yards. The Judges switched between a Cover 2 and a Cover 4, usually playing back to allow Skyline passes over the middle, but nothing over their heads.

"We just didn't want to give up any big plays," said Wilson, a cornerback. "I go to the field [side], and they like to throw to the field, so when we stopped the run we know that they were going to pass the ball a little bit more, and make them one-dimensional."

Skyline had the extra point blocked, and from there Handley wasted no time in reclaiming the momentum. Two quick passes to Robert Galloway and a heave to Vance Washington for 22 yards set up an 8-yard slant pass from Brian Tavenner to Galloway for a touchdown.

"They played a coverage that allowed us to do some quick stops, some quick passes," Galloway said.

Skyline took over with 2:37 left, but the Hawks' drive stalled at the 35. White was routinely hurried in the pocket, and Skyline faced fourth-and-15 on the first play of the fourth quarter.

"We tried to swing people from different angles," Handley coach Tony Rayburn said of the Judges' blitz schemes. "Our outside 'backers, our inside 'backers, mix our stunts, loop 'backers, cross them over top sometimes. Coach [Jim Gaynor] does a good job of mixing that up."

The Hawks' short punt bounced to Wilson, who picked it up and raced down the right sideline. He beat the coverage to the edge, and only stopped 66 yards later in the end zone.

"I seen that it was a short kick, and I was hoping for a pretty good bounce," he said. "That's what I got — a perfect bounce. So when I picked it up, I just seen green."

Trailing 16-6, Skyline traded possessions with the Judges before developing a noticeable sense of urgency when recovering a fumble by Wilson with 3:23 left in the game. Working with a short field, the Hawks got into the red zone on a 33-yard screen pass to Kieren Caison. Two plays later, White rolled out and hit Terrell Matthews for a 6-yard touchdown pass with 2:25 left.

"They've got a group of players where if you give them a lot of opportunities, like we did at the end there on a short field, it's tough to stop them," Rayburn said.

The extra point was wide left, so the Hawks needed a touchdown. They couldn't recover the onside kick try, but held Wilson to 9 yards on three-straight carries. They'd made history for the second-year program by going 5-0 to that point, and a stop on fourth down with 49 seconds left would give them a chance at something sweeter.

Then came the jump, and the flag, and the whistle. Game over.

"We tried to make history, winning homecoming," Thorne said. "But it just didn't work out like that. [We'll] just take it one week at a time now, look forward to Sherando. We'll see what happens."

* Contact Craig Juer at cjuer@nvdaily.com