CHAMPAIGN — It was a similar comeback with an identical result.

Six days after a miraculous comeback lifted Illini West into Friday’s Class 3A state football championship, the Chargers once again managed to take their first lead with less than a minute left in the fourth quarter.

An 18-yard pass from Illini West quarterback Michael Lafferty to Jacob Schmudlach, who was ranging toward the right side of the end zone, gave the Chargers the lead with 25 seconds left, a 21-14 victory against DuQuoin and their first Class 3A state trophy.

It seemed the storyline was going to be that penalties and turnovers had finally caught up with the Chargers and were going to derail their title hopes.

But Lafferty found Schmudlach on the same route as last week’s game-winning pass to Zack Burling.

“It was the exact same route — the same effect,” Lafferty said. “The time we ran it before that was when I threw the interception (in the first half) and Jacob just got behind the corner this time and I put it in the air for him.”

Both the 27-23 semifinal victory last Saturday against Oregon in Carthage and Friday’s state championship had similarities.

Each had Illini West (14-0) taking its first lead with less than 39.6 seconds left in the fourth quarter.

Lafferty completed the game-winning pass in each.

Both ended on a Zack Burling interception on the first play from scrimmage after the eventual game-winning score to seal the win.

And both concluded with the opposition in disbelief.

“We didn’t want the semifinal game to be our defining moment,” Illini West second-year coach Jim Unruh said. “We didn’t want that to be what we were about. And I don’t think that semifinal game will be our defining moment at all.”

It won’t be, thanks to Lafferty’s left arm, his sure-handed receivers — Burling and Schmudlach — and junior Stefan Flynn bulldozing his way past DuQuoin defenders for 213 rushing yards.

The Chargers’ defense forced their fourth three-and-out of the game, giving them the ball 66 yards away from taking their first lead with 2:58 left in the game and all three of their timeouts.

After two running plays, Lafferty completed a pass to Burling  for a third-down conversion. That put the ball 39 yards away from the end zone.

Five Flynn runs later put the ball at the DuQuoin 14 for a third and five. But an illegal substitution penalty backed the Chargers up five yards before Lafferty hooked up with Schmudlach.

Burling, just like last week, intercepted the ball on DuQuoin’s first play on the ensuing possession to seal Illini West’s first state championship in the second season since Carthage, Dallas City and LaHarpe converged.

While the Chargers ended the game like champions, after three quarters it seemed Unruh was destined for his fifth second-place finish — rather than his fifth state championship ring.

The Chargers were winning the game statistically. But on the scoreboard they trailed ever since DuQuoin (12-2) scored 2:15 into the second quarter. The Indians took advantage of a Chargers fumble at the DuQuoin 23-yard line.

The Indians capitalized, moving the ball at-will for a 22-play drive that went 77 yards in nearly eight minutes. DuQuoin quarterback A.J. Hill capped the drive with a 1-yard scoring run

Illini West had two lengthy first-half drives stall due to penalties — and a turnover  — causing the Chargers to trail 7-0 at halftime. 

“We go in at halftime and I thought it was kind of interesting,” Unruh said. “We go in (the locker room) and the guys were discouraged but I think they knew that they were the better football team.”

The Chargers began the second half moving the ball from their own 30 to the Indians’ four. But this opportunity was squandered with a red-zone fumble by Mitchell Beals, who had 90 yards on 12 carries.

The Illini West defense stepped up, forcing DuQuoin to punt three downs later.
On the ensuing drive, the Chargers ran the ball six times for 38 yards. The scoring drive was capped off with a Flynn two-yard score and a Lafferty PAT - which was nearly blocked to tie the game at 7.

After being a non-factor last week, being held to 45 yards on 13 carries, Flynn helped the Chargers outgain the Indians 377-91.

“I was pretty upset last week,” Flynn said. “I didn’t get the yards I wanted to. … But this week I came into it, I knew I wanted the ball, I knew I wanted to score, I knew I wanted to do what I had to do for the team.”

DuQuoin answered right back, using a 16-play drive to reclaim the lead — a 14-7 advantage — on a 1-yard pass from Hill to David Rose with 16 seconds left in the third quarter.

The Indians forced the Chargers to punt on their next possession.

The Chargers nearly tied the game on Flynn’s 33-yard Flynn run with 5:12 left in the game. But Lafferty’s PAT was blocked by Jamar Reed and the Chargers still trailed by one, 14-13.

Even though the Chargers never trailed during the regular season, and rarely trailed in the postseason, Illini West proved it could handle adversity.

“A lot of people think because we’ve been on top so much that we don’t how to deal with adversity,” assistant coach Tim Lafferty said. “We do know how to deal with adversity. We deal with it like champions.”