Sometimes both sides have winners

Monday, Dec. 3, 2007 | 7:15 a.m.

For every reaction, there is an equal and opposite reaction. That's a law of motion.

What goes up, must come down. That's a law of gravity.

For every winner, there is a loser. That's a law of state championship football games.

Well, most of the time anyway.

The winner

Midway through the second quarter of Saturday afternoon's Nevada 4A state title game with Bishop Gorman in command of a 23-0 lead, one of the McQueen cheerleaders noticed the little guy who was primarily responsible for putting the Gaels there inching toward the line of scrimmage.

"No. 4! Get No. 4!" she shouted before lacing her fingers tightly together and placing them in front of her face, perhaps trying to ward off the biting 25-mph wind, perhaps praying that somebody else would carry the football.

No. 4 is Bishop Gorman's Keola Antolin, who by then already had scored touchdowns on runs of nine and 90 yards.

On this particular play, No. 17 carried the ball. The Lancers stopped him after a short gain. The cheerleader unlaced her fingers.

The wind had stopped blowing. Her prayer had been answered.

Both situations were only momentary.

Because Antolin is Gorman's answer to the Chicago Bears' Devin Hester, and because when the wind's blowing like the dickens you need somebody who is fast enough to slice right through it, and because football coaches who finish 14-0 don't get that way by being foolish, you knew Bob Altshuler, the Gaels' coach, would find another way to get the football to No. 4.

Like that time in September when the team from Upland, Calif., had lined up for a 61-yard field goal. At the last second, Altshuler told Antolin to go stand on the goal line, just in case the kick was short, and when it was, Antolin made Altshuler look like Bill Walsh by running 100 yards with the football tucked under his arm.

That's why when the score was 23-17 and that cheerleader and everybody else wearing silver and blue had their fingers laced real tight again, instead of handing the ball to No. 17, the Gaels gave it to No. 4, who ran with it for 30 yards. Then they threw it to him in the flat for a 27-yard touchdown that made it 30-17. The final score was 38-17.

It had been 24 years between state championships for Bishop Gorman, which hardly seems possible. But after rushing for 203 yards and those three touchdowns, Antolin wasn't thinking about history, or even about watching the home video that his mom, Nancy, was shooting in the stands, because standing behind the tripod and watching her son play in the viewfinder is the only way she can remain calm. "I didn't think about anything," Antolin said.

"I just ran."

The other winner

When Alex LaVoy, McQueen's middle linebacker, emerged from the locker room, his cheeks were still red from chasing Antolin around the field.

So were his eyes. LaVoy had kept a stiff upper lip when talking to reporters but when he saw all those uncles and cousins who had come to see him play his last high school game, he cried, too. But only a little.

A few minutes earlier, the NIAA official had handed LaVoy, the Lancers' captain, the runner-up trophy. That's the way fate would have it. But it just as easily could have been the larger trophy.

LaVoy's mom is the former Annie Puliz. His uncles, Allen and Tim, played football at Bishop Gorman in the 1970s. When the Puliz boys were getting their moving and storage companies started - you've probably seen the trucks - Allen stayed in Las Vegas while Tim and Annie went to Reno to establish a base up there.

Allen Puliz, who was wearing a blue McQueen ball cap over his red UNLV hoodie, said he recently moved Bishop Gorman into its new campus. His brother did the same when McQueen got a new stadium.

The Puliz gang wasn't hard to pick out of the crowd. While most of the spectators, especially those on the Gorman side, donned expensive down vests and jackets to keep warm, Alex LaVoy's cheering section huddled under those quilted blue blankets that are used to wrap refrigerators.

With his football-playing uncles and football-playing cousins - two of Tim's sons also made it to the playoffs, with different teams - and a football-playing brother, Robbie, who also played middle linebacker for McQueen and wore No. 58, you could say that Alex LaVoy was born to play the game.

What he wasn't born with is a left hand.

"I always told him he was special, that he would make up for it in other ways," his mom said.

LaVoy is so good that until you notice that the glove he wears is missing four fingers you would never know he has a disability. He's also the McQueen punter and is one of the nation's top junior trap shooters. He says he has never really thought of his birth defect as a disability, that if anything, it has made him push harder.

As Ken Dalton, McQueen's avuncular coach, said in a recent interview: "He's our punter, he's our tackler, he has better hands than anybody - and he only has one."

It's too bad that Sir Isaac Newton died in 1727. When the wind blew another apple off the tree Saturday, he could have explained it to me.

And I could have showed him that for every winner, there's another winner, if you know where to look.