By Kalle Oakes,Staff Writer

FRYEBURG – Mountain Valley scored eight touchdowns, two per quarter, pulling players from the fourth and fifth rungs of the depth chart in its 56-0 rout of Fryeburg on Saturday afternoon.

It wasn’t the high volume of points the unbeaten, reigning Class B football champions scored, however, but how hard the Raiders made them work for most of them that spoke volumes about the beleaguered hosts. Andy Shorey and Matt Lyons capped off three scoring drives with quarterback sneaks. Later, after three-and-a-half quarters of torrential rain would have left most winless teams pleading with the officials to employ running time, Fryeburg forced Mountain Valley freshman Travis Ruff to finish the job after it stopped Tom Cloutier’s 69-yard run at the pylon.

Three days earlier, Fryeburg’s athletic department lost most of its past and present possessions in a blaze that destroyed Gibson Gymnasium. There’s no way the Raiders were going to allow Mountain Valley to take away anything else without a fight, not even a relatively meaningless yard.

“Perseverance,” said Fryeburg coach Jim “Fuzzy” Thurston. “I think perseverance is what we learned this week.”

Mountain Valley (7-0) dominated from kickoff to kneel down in extending the state’s longest winning streak to 18 games. The Falcons’ starting offense never saw the field after accumulating a 27-0 lead at halftime. Fifteen players carried the ball for the Falcons and seven different cobalt blue-and-gray jerseys reached the end zone. In addition to the scores by Shorey, Lyons and Ruff, Travis Fergola barreled in from 3 yards out, Justin Staires went the distance with a 48-yard punt return, Devin Roberts squirted away to a 31-yard TD and John Gorham joined the fun with a 76-yard ramble.

“We struggled the past couple of weeks,” said co-captain Fergola, whose Falcons still knocked Greely and York from the Western Class B unbeaten ranks with those performances. “We know we need to play a lot better when we get to the playoffs.”

Taking the field in borrowed, piecemeal jerseys in a Homecoming game that almost never happened, Fryeburg (0-7) fumbled the ball away six times, threw an interception and didn’t pick up a first down until the fourth quarter.

Their hard-nosed tackles in the red zone were highlights. So was a defensive stand that halted the Falcons’ game-opening, 15-play drive at the Fryeburg 16. Mountain Valley didn’t get on the board until Staires’ special teams strike with 2:01 remaining in the first quarter.

“I was pretty happy at that point, to almost escape the first quarter,” Thurston said. “They’re such a good football team. They keep coming at you.”

Fergola and Aaron Arsenault combined for 19 carries and 95 yards in limited playing time. Brendan Bradley (two sacks and an interception), Thaddeus Bennett and Cody Grasruck led the defense for the Falcons, who outgained the Raiders 407 yards to 75.