I defy you — no matter what your relationship to sports — to watch this without a catch in your throat, and a little water in your eyes.

Thanks to Times-Gazette community blogger Steve Mills for posting it.

The Cascade Champions are now 6-0, guaranteed a winning season, and have outscored their opponents by a total of 225 to 54.

I’m over guest blogging at Music City Bloggers this weekend, by the way, so please stop by and see me there.

The county where I live has three public high schools. There’s the big one in Shelbyville, and two rural schools: Community, in the northwest part of the county, and Cascade, my alma mater, in the northeast part.

Cascade has had a football program ever since I was in school in the late 1970s. I don’t follow high school sports that closely, but I do have enough fond feelings for my alma mater to have some vague sense of how they’re doing in a given year. For most of the 426 years since my graduation, our football program was not real successful. Last year, however, we had a great year and were ranked among the highest in the state in Class A. We’re highly ranked again this year.

Community, on the other hand, went for years without a football program. They started freshman football a few years ago and have their first-ever varsity program this year.

Naturally, tonight’s first-ever gridiron meeting between the two schools has been a topic of discussion all week. Last night, at the school board meeting, Amy Martin, who represents Community’s district, brought a Vikings jersey and hung it in front of her place at the conference table. She had some good-natured banter with Dixie Parker, who represents Cascade’s district (and whose son is Cascade’s coach).

As a loyal alum, I naturally wanted Cascade to preserve its unbeaten record and good ranking. But I also knew that the natural rivalry between the two schools might serve to fire up the underdog and I thought it might be a closer game than the schools’ records and statistics would indicate.

I needn’t have worried. The final score, according to the TSSAA web site, was Cascade 62, Community 19.