I woke up Saturday morning, and did my weekly box score check of the most recent Garfield football game. As I began scanning the high school football box scoes, I wondered, how much did we lose by this week? After a few heart palpitations, a double take, and an enormous laugh out loud, I began to digest the thought that we had actually won a game. Garfield football won a game. “How old is this paper?” I asked myself. I checked the front of the sports section to make sure that it was indeed Saturday, September 8th. Garfield had beaten Lake Washington 44 – 23.

The whole weekend, everywhere I went, people told me that they heard a rumor that Garfield won a football game. After shielding my embarrassment of what our football program has become, I told them it was true. This was the second time since I have been in high school that Garfield has won a varsity football game. While saying that Garfield won a football game has become more of a punchline than a true statement the last couple of years, this win could change things. Garfield ended its 11-game losing streak, the second-longest in the state, and when they won a game two years ago it ended the state’s longest losing streak. But the win against Franklin two years ago felt fake, they squeezed it out, against another abysmal inner-city team. This win is authentic. This one was a blowout, against an Eastside school. This one was a statement.

As senior kicker Max Rennebohm put it, “For our team, we always had a thing about going across the water; this changed our mentality. Beating Lake Washington showed that we could beat people besides Seattle schools, that we could beat any team in our conference. We really aren’t at that much of a disadvantage, we’ve just got to work hard.”

Sadly Garfield is expected to lose. But this win might change that culture; it makes the players work harder.

“For me personally, it made me want to win every game from now on, it makes you want to win more, especially beating an Eastside team,” said Rennebohm.

This win is so huge because it changes a mentality, a mentality that you can go into the lion’s den and come out alive. The football team now knows what it feels like to go across the Lake, go into a school’s million-dollar facility, drown out the noise of their army of face painted students, and be successful.

Before, Garfield couldn’t conceive what it feels like to come out of an Eastside game victorious. But now they have a taste, and it might just make them want it that much more. This past week the Bulldogs faced Franklin, another beatable team, but the real Garfield team wasn’t even on the field, because they were missing four starters, so I am going to ignore the result of the Franklin game. But now they know what if feel like to beat an Eastiside team. The football team is trying to change a culture; a culture of losing. Coach Anthony Allen was quoted in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer as saying, “ These guys have lost for so long, they forgot how to win.”

What makes a win against an Eastside school so sweet is the upset factor. It’s the fact that the programs over there have been breeding football players since they were fourth graders. It’s the known feeling that Eastside schools have no respect for the twenty to thirty members across the field on the Garfield sideline that enhances every victory.

No one in their right mind could possibly think Bothell or Woodinville has better athletes at their school than Garfield, but what they do have is better programs. So as the Garfield football program slowly turns around, hopefully so will the culture. Ideally, instead of wondering how much the football team lost by one week, I would hope to think the football team went across the lake and shocked another disrespectful opponent.