There were rain-soaked smiles bright enough to illuminate the four-hour drive home from the northwest corner of Massachusetts after Bates College beat New England Small College Athletic Conference football rival Williams College last Saturday.

Nobody in a mud-speckled, white-and-maroon uniform bubbled over with as much joy, however, as a strapping, 6-foot-3, 235-pound tight end named Mike Moynahan.

Moynahan, you see, grew up in the shadow of Williams, which is to NESCAC football what the New York Yankees are to the American League.

He grew up watching his brother, Matt, hammer out a four-year career in which he was All-Everything for the Ephs. He works out with current Williams players during the summer. Also courted by Williams and especially by Bowdoin, Mike chose Bates because he visited the Lewiston campus when another brother, Brendan, attended there in the early 1990s and fell in love with the place.

“He’ll finish his fourth year of football and then go do something else. It was something he’ll never experience again,” Steve Moynahan, rightfully proud father of a well-educated clan, said Friday from his home in Williamstown, Mass. “They were magnificent.”

Bates 13, Williams 6.

No big deal unless you know something about the history of NESCAC, where that score essentially is the equivalent of Duke beating Florida State or Baylor knocking off Nebraska.

In other words, the earlier use of the word ‘rival’ is a tad misplaced, as much as it is in the Yankees-Red Sox ri-, uh, relationship. It takes two to tango, after all, and until last Saturday afternoon, Bates-Williams may have been the most one-sided series since Wile E. Coyote vs. The Roadrunner.

Fifteen times, the Bobcats teed it up against the Ephs (named after Colonel Ephraim Williams, who bequeathed the funds to establish the college in 1793). Fifteen times, the descendants of Ephraim doled out a Bobcat butt-kicking of Biblical proportions.

Few of the games were close. 35-0. 27-0. 17-14 in overtime three years ago, which might as well have been 55-6 if you assessed the long faces on the home sideline at Garcelon Field.

Ten schools play football in NESCAC, a conference that militantly places academic achievement ahead of athletics, intramural sports, eating and sleeping. Yet for whatever reason, Williams and Amherst traditionally stand above the fray, while Bates has spent its current players’ lifetime pining to vacate the league basement.

“I didn’t start watching it closely until the last few years,” said Steve Moynahan, “but there were several years in a row where they had zero wins or one win.”

Sixth-year head coach Mark Harriman, who led Harvard and Princeton to Ivy League championships as a defensive coordinator, has accelerated the expectations. A moribund 2-46 in the six seasons before Harriman’s arrival, Bates has won multiple CBB (Colby-Bates-Bowdoin) championships. The Bobcats went 4-4 in 1999, their first .500 campaign in 17 years, and finished last autumn with a three-game winning streak after an 0-5 start.

“Mike chose Bates because he was so impressed with Harriman,” Steve Moynahan said. “Most kids after four years get a little jaundiced toward their coach. Not Mike. Not with Harriman. I hope when people look at his record they understand how much he has accomplished. If they give him time, Harriman will do great things at Bates.”

Beating Williams, though? Never happened. Couldn’t happen in a million years.

“My son Matt made the starting lineup four games into his freshman year at Williams,” said Steve. “He was 28-1 as a starter. Dick Farley recently said he was the best tight end he’s coached in 27 years at Williams.”

As has become his custom at Bates, Mike Moynahan didn’t play the marquee role. He caught two passes from Chris Gwozdz for 17 yards, his first positive yardage of the season.

His primary task was joining the offensive line in opening holes for NESCAC Newcomer of the Week Ken Adams, another Massachusetts native who rushed for 119 yards and scored the winning touchdown with less than a minute left in regulation.

“He was a good baseball player. Then he got big,” said Matt’s father. “He didn’t play football until his sophomore year of high school. I tell him they list him small on the roster. He’s really closer to 6-4, 245. He says, ‘Dad, I don’t care if the other team sees me in the scouting report as 6-feet, 200 pounds.’ He’s right. It’s probably better that way.”

Maybe that was one element of Bates’ upset. The Bobcats are bigger and badder (in the good sense of the word) than they look. Sure, rain is a great equalizer, but so is chronic underestimation of a program that’s never given anyone a reason to reckon it dangerous.

Others say it’s a down year for Williams. Perhaps, perhaps not.

At Bates, the once unthinkable victory underscores the conviction that the Bobcats have turned the corner on two wheels with the accelerator to the floor.

And if one triumph represents nothing more than an aberration, hey, everyone loves an underdog.

“Matt flew in from California on a red-eye last weekend, and he was out of town 22 hours later,” Steve Moynahan said. “He was on the Bates sideline screaming the whole time. He told me red blood is a lot thicker than a little purple paint.”

Kalle Oakes is sports editor and can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].