Homewood-Flossmoor's journey to a state championship begins now, and CSN will bring you inside the locker room and the huddle with weekly features as this year's DRIVE team for the 2015 football season.
Quarterback Bryce Gray returned from Champaign in the wee hours of the morning and re-watched the entire game he had just played in. Devonte Harley-Hampton viewed it beginning to end multiple times over the summer, taking mental notes. His brother, Deante, hasn't shied away from watching the tape, either, despite the ending. Head coach Craig Buzea spent the offseason hearing from everyone about it being the greatest game they had ever witnessed.
But instead of the Homewood-Flossmoor Vikings basking in the glory of an 8A state championship last fall, watching that game is instead a reminder of just how close they came.
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Trailing 31-16 with less than 7 minutes remaining, the Vikings scored a touchdown, tallied a safety and recovered an onside kick that gave them a chance to earn the unlikeliest of comebacks on the game's biggest stage. The Vikings, led by Gray and the Harley-Hampton twins, trudged down the field inside a minute to play before Deante fumbled at the 3-yard line, 9 feet from glory in the game's final minute.
Given the cyclical turnover of high school athletics, a trip to the state championship game is a luxury. Since 2001, only two teams have even appeared in back-to-back 8A state title games (Lockport in 2002 and 2003; Maine South in 2003 and 2004, and again in 2008, 2009 and 2010). The vast majority of yearly contenders compile a talented senior class and game-ready juniors to grasp that one shot at a trip down south, either finding success as champions or falling back into the talented pool of the state's biggest class.
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The Vikings aren't the vast majority of teams.
Buzea returns eight of 11 starters, including his five best players, from a 2014 offense that compiled more than 6,000 yards and scored nearly 600 points in 14 games. That supremely talented junior class, most of whom played as sophomores on the varsity team, are now seniors and realize their time is now. As sophomores they bowed out in the second round and suffered last year's deflating loss. Instead of reeling from those defeats, they all remember their senior teammates falling short and don't want to experience the same.
"It motivates me and drives me and all these guys, where every year we say, 'We'll do it for you guys,' now we actually have to do it," Gray said after the first day of practice. "We have so many guys coming back from the playoff run last year. So we're really trying to do it, not just for ourselves and the school but the guys who came before us."