With that barrier now finally broken the Patriots face an equally daunting challenge — not stepping back.

“We could still go 0-8,” third-year head coach Mark Renna said. “We definitely don’t think we’re going to just walk in this league and go 4-4 again. We know we have to work hard, and that the possibility of 0-8 is good. It’s a good thing to have in the back of your mind. We’ve been there, we don’t want to be there anymore. So we know what we have to do to not have that happen again to us.”

Easier said than done. The Patriots must replace 12 seniors, who made up half of last year’s playoff team.

“I think we were led by a lot of senior leaders last year,” said senior lineman Brandon LaFlamme, one of a few returning starters. “This year the goal is to fill in for them, and right now we have a lot of kids put in the work. I’m really excited to see how it goes so far.”

LaFlamme stressed that work outside of game day was the key for a better Friday night under the lights.

“I think we deifnitely put in the work last year, and it proved on the field. Put in the work, it proves on the field,” said LaFlamme, who added: “Keep working hard. Because we know we can get there now. It’s just getting that next step up in the ladder. Keep pushing, and we can get there. We can prove everybody wrong.”

“I think that what happened last year definitely makes us want to go further and work harder,” junior Jaykob Sanborn said.

The players didn’t want to talk much about last season during the preseason. Instead they were focused on the present, and making last year be just the start, not an outlier.

“We’re saying 4-4 was a good start,” Renna said. “It’s mediocre. We don’t want to be mediocre. We want to step up.”

Sanborn credited Renna for being the coach to finally bring the Patriots to the promised land of the playoffs.

“He just kept trying,” Sanborn said. “He knew that we needed that motivation, we needed to just keep working harder. He just kept pushing us.”

“It was the coaches,” senior running back Boomer Simmons added. “The coaches helped us believe that we could win, and that we could be good. The coaches put it in our mind that if we work we’re going to win. We all put in the work and we did fairly good.”

The Patriots must replace much of their backfield — save for Simmons — as well as the line minus LaFLamme. There will be new faces, but hungry appetites to fill those vacated positions, and prove last year wasn’t a fluke.

“The difference is that the kids actually know they can succeed right now,” Renna said. “To actually see those kids realize that they can succeed in this league, and play, that was huge (last year). So this year we have that little bit of confidence.

“Success is breeding here, and we know that if we do put the work in, and we do execute, we can succeed.”

wkramlich@sunjournal.com