At the half, one just couldn’t be sure which way it was going to go.

But … it went the way of the Raiders, and, as a result, they are on their way to the Section 9, Class C championship at Monroe-Woodbury High School on Saturday, Nov. 14. They’ll play Highland at noon.

Raider Coach Adam DiBenedetto concedes last week was “a tough game,” a 22-8 win over Dover.

“It was definitely a closely contested game that required a lot of guts to come out on top,” he said. “Dover is a good team. They have a lot of good players and definitely made our team work for everything.”

Nobody scored in the first quarter. O’Neill went on to score quickly in the second quarter, but with just over a minute left in the first half, the Dragons scored and got the two-point conversion. It looked like the Raiders might score again before the half, but a long run after the kickoff by Ames Jannetta got called back after a flag was thrown at about the 50-yard line.

That meant the score at halftime was 8-7, Dover. There were enough penalties in the first half that, from the sidelines, O’Neill Athletic Director Brooks Alexander, a long-time football coach in New Jersey, said he’d never seen so many penalties in a single half of high school football.

DiBenedetto agrees.

“The first half was closely contested. We had some chances, but we committed a lot of penalties that took a couple of scores off the board for us,” he said. “That really could have come back to bite us and that was the main reason we went into halftime trailing.”

As both teams huddled at far ends of the field during half-time the coaches reminded their players this could be their last game of the season.

“In the second half, we started to open up a little bit,” the coach said. “Our defense stepped up and was able to get some timely stops but also create some big plays as well. We had three sacks in the second half - Dominic Marotta, AJ Mackey and Trey Murphy - and we were able to keep them out of the end zone. Our offense started to get its mojo a bit and we moved the ball a lot better and were able to finish a couple of drives and execute some big time plays that put us over the top.”

Murphy ran the ball 20 times for 134 yards and had two touchdowns; one a 10-yard run, and on a two-yard run. Quarterback AJ Mackey scored on a QB sneak and threw four-for-six for 80 yards.

“Add in a sack and an interception, he had a pretty complete game,” DiBenedetto said.

“Each of those four completions were big plays that really catapulted us forward.”

Jannetta was recipient of two of Mackey’s passes, for 37 yards – one, the coach said, on a nice deep pass. The other, in the third quarter, was on a short screen pass, where he converted a big third down for the Raiders.
The next play, Keegan Arbogast, who was back for his first game since spraining his ankle, caught a contested 28-yard catch that set up Murphy’s second touchdown which put O’Neill back in the lead. Earlier in the same drive, David Prosperie also caught a ball for 15 yards giving the Raiders a first down.

“All of these plays were critical on that drive to move the ball down the field for us,” DiBenedetto said. “The guys really just stepped up in the second half and did what was necessary to win a playoff game. For nearly every player on the team, this was their first time playing in a playoff game.”

Next week the stakes are even higher.

“We’ll be competing for the chance to win the first section championship since 2023,” the coach said. “We have a lot of work to do to play against a very good Highland team who obviously got the better of us three weeks ago.”

Highland goes into the game with a 7-2 record, to O’Neill’s 7-3. Highland beat O’Neill 31-15 on October 24.