Mistakes happen. Sometimes in key games. But Friday night, Fenwick’s stellar football team got robbed, hosed, jobbed, knee-capped in what should have been the very final seconds of a game that would have sent Fenwick to the state finals for the first time ever.
Instead, not a subjective interpretation of a play but a straight-out blown rules call gave the competition a bonus play which it used to score a field goal and drive the game into an overtime loss for the Friars.
And it is not just Fenwick coaches, team parents, and our irate sports editor who see this as a monumental and enormously painful gaffe by officials. Late Friday night the executive director of the IHSA issued a statement acknowledging the outright error, admitted the game should have ended in regulation with a Fenwick victory and offered an apology to the team.
What he could not do, under IHSA rules, is to overrule the call on the field. And that is just wrong.