They intended to forfeit.

Fryeburg Academy’s football team awoke Wednesday morning to the sickening smell of ash and cinders, its decades-old school gymnasium and every trace of its pigskin program destroyed by a fire at the center of the school campus.

“As of 7 a.m. Wednesday,” said Fryeburg coach Jim “Fuzzy” Thurston, “we had no plans to play this game.”

Nobody with a lick of common sense would have begrudged Fryeburg a pass for the remaining Friday nights and Saturday afternoons of an autumn that’s produced nary a win.

Certainly, nobody expected to Fryeburg to show up and take its Homecoming medicine against unbeaten, reigning Class B champion Mountain Valley. Three days after the fire? In rain that left shin-deep puddles blocking almost every walking path to the field?

Raise your hand if you’d rather have a root canal.

“Jimmy (Mountain Valley coach Jim Aylward) e-mailed me Wednesday morning, and we probably talked on the phone four or five times that day,” Thurston said, “and he said everybody would understand if we called it off. But he also said they would do whatever they could to help us play. That was the kick in the butt I needed.”

In borrowed uniforms, with almost no practice, and soaked to the gills, Fryeburg played.

The Raiders put the ball on the ground six times and didn’t sniff a first down until the Falcons’ fourth-stringers surrendered a few in the fourth quarter. They watched seven different Mountain Valley players celebrate a touchdown. Heck, even two botched extra point attempts turned into successful two-point conversions.

Scoreboard said Guest 56, Home 0.

High school football and the human spirit won.

“I’m just glad the whole state of Maine came together so those guys could compete,” said Mountain Valley senior co-captain Travis Fergola.

“I wanted us to do anything we could so Fryeburg could have a Homecoming,” added Aylward. “Fuzzy’s a great guy. Those kids deserved the opportunity.”

In times like these, journalists develop a delusion that our craft is destined to save the world. We slap down our soapbox, climb aboard and concoct some claptrap about the game being “secondary.”

Hogwash! This one-sided, often agonizing game meant everything in the world to Fryeburg.

Nothing against the school, which I’m sure leaves its students worldly wise and amply prepared for college, but Fryeburg’s 48 football players won’t learn anything more valuable in a math or civics class during their four years than they gleaned from Saturday’s first step onto the gridiron.

Fires happen in adult life. Bankruptcies and break-ups happen. Cancer and car wrecks happen.

We’re left with two choices. We can curl into a fetal position, lock out the world and resist every urge to take a chance for the remainder of an unfulfilling life.

Or we can punch back.

Fryeburg chose the courageous option, sowing what seems to be, at first glance, a sour 56-0 defeat.

But they’ll reap the benefits as alumni, as grown-ups, as parents and grandparents, long after the next gymnasium grows old.

Kalle Oakes is a staff writer. His e-mail is [email protected].