Third town was the charm

This is the Lonesome End, revisited.

Not-So-Lonesome, actually – there are two of them. Also, they are very much a part of a team and a tradition which three months ago had nothing to do with them.

Of course, the tradition had experienced a brief hiccup, too.

But in the foggy bottom of Albi Stadium late Saturday afternoon, normalcy was restored. Hitched to a relentless running attack and aided by the recovery of a fumble on which the game swiveled, the Tigercats of LaCrosse-Washtucna – the scourge of eight-man football from 2002-2005 – earned their way back to the Gridiron Classic next weekend in Tacoma after a two-year exile, the circumstances of which make this return all the sweeter.

Wait, we seem to have dropped a town out there in the scablands.

Make that LaCrosse- Washtucna-Kahlotus, now the biggest mouthful of the athletic co-ops that blossom in rural eastern Washington as populations wither.

And quite an oasis for Gary Marmes and Garrett Whitney.

They are the Tigercats who came in from the cold – or rather, came in from Kahlotus – and among the 20 players who reveled in front of the east bleachers at Albi Stadium after a tense 36-32 victory over previously unbeaten Cusick in the State 1B playoffs.

The football couldn’t have been better or the contrasts more charming at Saturday’s semifinal doubleheader, if you could make it out through the soup. Ferris fell to mega-hyped Skyline 24-21 in as good of a big-school game as has been seen in the city – all see-saw drama and tricked-out passing schemes and speed galore. And then the 3,110 spectators who paid their way in for that one bailed and were replaced by 280 country cousins who saw a game just as good, only with the sandlot thrills of serpentine scrambling and guard-eligibles.

In the end, Cusick couldn’t get one final stop of the Tigercats – who ran the ball on all 19 of their fourth-quarter snaps, most of them by tailback Garrett Blauert, whose 297 yards must have seemed to the Panthers like the 297 miles that separate Albi from the Tacoma Dome.

“You never take it for granted,” said Tigercats coach Jeff Nelson, who steered them to those four titles and a state-record 49 straight victories earlier this decade. “I never thought we’d get there the first time.”

He had to wonder if they’d get back so soon. The Tigercats slipped to 7-4 and were ousted in the 1B qualifying round in 2006 and again in 2007, when a 5-5 finish included two losses at the end to Touchet and Odessa stopped early by the 45-point mercy rule.

“That left a sour taste,” he said. “We had injuries, kids ineligible. Our quarterback broke his collarbone, our fullback got hurt – so we had Blauert back there (at quarterback). But it paid off – those kids got some game-time experience.”

And then came the Kahlotus factor.

The Koyotes haven’t fielded a football team for two seasons, and played just a junior varsity schedule in 2006. They’ve had a standing invitation to become part of the Tigercats co-op, but no one answered the phone until last spring.

“That’s when I finally said, I’m going to go down and talk to the kids and say, ‘Hey, here’s what we do, here’s the program we run, we’d love to have you,’ ” Nelson said.

One hopeful showed at the meeting – Gary Marmes.

“We didn’t have a team last year and I really missed football,” he said. “So I felt like I deserved to play for them. They’re a great team.”

Then Whitney’s family moved into the Kahlotus district from Elma, where he’d spent his freshman year. He starts on offense at end, and ran for a touchdown and a 2-point conversion on short reverses Saturday. Marmes is his opposite on defense, and had a sack and several other notable tackles.

“It’s been fun,” Marmes said. “At first we were just kind of Kahlotus people, but as the season goes on you get to know guys better and pretty soon they’re your friends. I knew a few of them before, too. I played in the pep band before for basketball and I’d gone over to play baseball. It’s definitely worth going over there and playing for something.”

Something at stake, he means. That record streak and those trophies would seem to cast a large shadow on the current Tigercats, but Nelson doesn’t think that’s the case.

“If it does, it’s not coming from me and it’s not from each other,” he said.

Mostly it’s for each other, in an unusual bond born out of what is a marriage of both necessity and inconvenience.

“We have gear scattered all over,” Nelson laughed. “Practice one week is in Washtucna, the next week in LaCrosse. Kids forget their gear. Sometimes we don’t have a bus scheduled for practice. It can get to be kind of a mess – but obviously there’s a payoff. And you get some great kids.”

Three counties, three school districts, 38 miles of country road and more fenceline than can be measured.

One destination – and a familiar one, at that.