AUBURN – Brutal honesty flowed even more freely than the tears of triumph and disbelief in the Mt. Blue High School football camp Friday night.

Defensive coordinator Craig Collins took the first stab at rationalizing the impossible and shutting off the emotions that grown men coaching a kids’ game aren’t supposed to show. Ever the extrovert, he failed miserably at both.

“Tell me how we just did that! I have no idea,” Collins exclaimed, moments before falling into a baseball catcher’s crouch near the 50-yard line at Walton Field and practically biting a hole in his bottom lip to fight the inevitable.

A shadow of last autumn’s Pine Tree Conference championship outfit, gutted by injury, riddled by practice no-shows and reports of team dissension all week, Mt. Blue knocked off Edward Little, 23-20, on a 38-yard Art Trask field goal with one second remaining in regulation.

Let’s set aside the standard fare about anything being possible when the unpredictable psyches and non-stop adrenaline of high school kids are involved. Based on pure X’s and O’s, matchups and the missing talent of two captains surveying from the sideline in street clothes, Mt. Blue had no business winning this game.

“My wife couldn’t be here tonight. She had to go make a run for granddaughter supplies,” said Mt. Blue coach Gary Parlin. “She left me a message on my cell phone before the game, saying, ‘Good luck.’ I called her back and left her a message saying the only way there would be good luck is if (Edward Little coach Darren) Hartley made a mistake and told his team the game was tomorrow night.”

Last Friday night, Mt. Blue suffered the indignity of a 25-24 home loss to lightly regarded Mt. Ararat. Losing a game turned out to be a trifling issue. The Cougars’ do-everything man on defense, Justin Lowe, suffered two torn knee ligaments and was lost for the year. Mike Toothaker, the second-leading rusher in Eastern Class A, went down with a sprained medial collateral ligament and is gone for two weeks.

Then, to compound the issue of commissioning raw sophomores and untested juniors and seniors for a road trip to face one of the hottest teams in the league, Parlin spent too much of Monday through Thursday playing traffic cop and truant officer.

“We had a lot of issues this week. Outside of school issues. Issues with people not showing up for practice,” said two-way lineman and, rarity of rarities, healthy (for now) co-captain Eric Gilbert. “It really ruined the whole week of practice and separated the team.”

So, how was your week?

“I can tell you the word ‘genius’ hasn’t been used around town much,” Parlin said.

Ah, but there’s no better boost for your perceived IQ than athletes being in the proper place to make plays and then performing above their abilities for two transcendent quarters.

Edward Little’s offense took possession four times in the first half. Three of those series ended in touchdowns. The other stalled mercifully for the Cougars on downs at their 31.

Somehow, the Cougars pitched a shutout after intermission. EL helped the cause with holding and intentional grounding penalties on its own potential game-winning drive. Prior to that, though, Mt. Blue gang-tackled like anything but a team divided.

The winning boot that would have been good from 50-plus merely frosted the cake for Trask, who ran about five miles from east to west to get his paws in on roughly two dozen tackles. In the absence of Toothaker and the dynamic Lowe, who will end his career roughly 20 tackles shy of the school record, Gilbert, Kevin Averill, Pete Farnum, Tim Lagasse, Gary Begin, Alex Johnson, D.J. Wilbur, Hall Robbins, Chris Gross and Bobby Duley played a game they’ll never forget.

“We’re going to roll now,” predicted Trask.

Well, maybe. But with Dr. Nancy Cummings and the team at Franklin Orthopedics already on his speed dial, Parlin might have to make another daunting call today.

It was hard to miss the sight of the 6-foot-5, 285-pound Gilbert limping away from the post-game huddle, his left ankle heavily taped. He played the final four minutes with the bad wheel.

“It might be sprained,” Gilbert said with a shrug. “The trainer thinks it might be broken. You never know with trainers.”

You never know with kids and coaches in this most emotional of the games people play, either. Friday night gave us all another reminder, if we needed it.

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