Bonney Lake stuns third-ranked Lincoln, 35-28, advances to state quarterfinals

Jason Silbaugh called his team together, with the rain pouring, one player lying on his back behind him and others still hugging and smiling in excitement.

And he remembered where his Bonney Lake High School football team started.

“I told you — we’ve been through it and they haven’t,” Silbaugh told his team.

Bonney Lake had to win its regular-season finale against Peninsula just to reach the postseason. But Friday it handed third-ranked Lincoln its first loss of the season, 35-28, at a soggy Lincoln Bowl despite trailing by a touchdown with less than two minutes remaining.

The Panthers (7-4) won their first state tournament game in school history and advance to the 3A state quarterfinals to face top-ranked, unbeaten and defending state champion Eastside Catholic.

Bonney Lake was 2-3 after its first five games of the season.

“I keep telling everybody, it’s a long season,” Silbaugh said. “You play a lot of games. What you do in the beginning doesn’t matter. It’s how you finish that matters and what counts, and that’s it.

“We’re a tough-nosed underdog that nobody believes in except for us.”

Senior running back Ethen Koepke pulled Bonney Lake to within 28-27 with 1:42 to play on his third touchdown of the game. That’s after he scored four touchdowns to end Arlington’s season last week.

No kicker. Silbaugh called for the two-point conversion.

He drew up the same play he called on a two-point conversion attempt that beat Enumclaw, 15-14, in overtime on Sept. 25 — a muddle huddle play with one offensive lineman, six players split out to the far left, three lined up in the backfield and one split to the right.

Jason Day looked as if he was about to be tackled short, but stretched out the ball and barely reached it to the goal line.

“We did it again and we knew we could get it,” Day said. “I had no doubt.”

Lincoln began its final drive from its own 22 and quarterback Joey Sinclair, who was playing in his first game since breaking his collarbone against Shelton in the fourth game of the season, hit Tony Archie for a 23-yard pass.

Sinclair then scrambled for a couple big gains and got Lincoln to Bonney Lake’s 26 with 38 seconds left.

The next play? Bonney Lake’s Riley Teed and Joseph O’Reilly sacked Sinclair for a 12-yard loss, with Lincoln out of timeouts.

Sinclair then hit Archie for five yards and just got off one final snap from the 33. He rolled out and threw toward the end zone, but it was intercepted by Patrick Oxile and returned 89 yards for a touchdown as Oxile ran along the Bonney Lake sideline with his teammates jumping and following him in jubilation.

“Patrick picked off the ball and I literally started screaming,” Koepke said. “I was just so happy and almost crying at the same time. It was a great moment.”

Lincoln entered as the highest-scoring 3A offense in the state at 47.6 points per game.

“I owe it to our D staff a lot,” Silbaugh said. “They said, ‘Hey, we thing we can do this. Let’s take away what they want to do.’ And our kids stepped up.”

Just like last season, Lincoln played without running back Dionte Simon, who left after three carries with what coach Masaki Matsumoto said was a shoulder injury.

The Abes (10-1) lost on their final drive last year, too, when then-head coach Jon Kitna’s team lost its first game of the season at Lincoln Bowl to Eastside Catholic when Jordan Kitna’s fourth-down pass in the red zone fell incomplete.

Matsumoto, who last year coached at Hollywood Bernstein in California, said he was proud of his team.

“I told them that football doesn’t define them,” Matsumoto said. “That they are good young men regardless of the score and losses, and I want to keep that in their heads because that’s what’s important.”

Meanwhile, Bonney Lake gets to continue a playoff run that the school has never before experienced.

“In the locker room I said it — we’ve been through the ringer before,” Silbaugh said. “We’ve been through adversity. I said, ‘That pays off.’ And it did.”

This story was originally published November 13, 2015 at 10:52 PM with the headline "Bonney Lake stuns third-ranked Lincoln, 35-28, advances to state quarterfinals."