It’s been a banner year for Lynnfield

They have become perhaps the Cinderella story on the North Shore in the 2009 football season. But the Lynnfield football team isn’t quite ready to put a period on what has turned into a dream season this fall.The Pioneers come into tomorrow morning’s showdown with archrival North Reading knowing full well that they will have another game to play on Tuesday as the champions of the Cape Ann League’s Small division. That doesn’t mean, however, that Lynnfield isn’t still ready to end the regular season with a splash.”I think the kids are excited for it and hopefully we will be ready (tomorrow),” Lynnfield coach Neal Weidman said. “Certainly its nice to have the championship already but on the other hand you don’t want to get caught looking forward to the playoffs. I don’t think that will happen.”Lynnfield had quietly been building towards a run at the postseason in 2009 thanks to an ultra talented senior class that took its lumps for three years before finally handing back some punishment this season.The Pioneers will come into the game sporting a 9-1 record and are a perfect 5-0 in league play. The nine wins is three more than the last two years combined for the Pioneers and is something that their head coach is glad to see finally happen.”We’ve known that we were working towards this for a while,” Weidman said. “We were really young for a couple of years and we knew that we had a chance to be better and this year has definitely worked out well for us.”Lynnfield has averaged 22.4 points per game this season thanks in large part to the play of seniors Gino Cohee and Chris Grassi.Cohee has been one of the best dual threat quarterback on the North Shore this season as he has rushed for 15 touchdowns and thrown for six others in the Pioneers spread attack. Grassi, meanwhile, has been a triple threat for the Pioneers as he has run, caught and thrown for touchdowns this season. Not bad for a player who spent the first two and a half years of his career as a starting quarterback.”Gino has played well and so has Chris. But they would be the first to tell you that they’ve needed the guys up front to do a good job,” Weidman said. “But I’m happy for all of the guys. You need to have two good classes back-to-back to have success and we’ve had that.”Lynnfield started the year fast, scoring 66 points in its first two games en route to easy wins over Matignon and Georgetown. They followed a 28-7 loss at Wilmington with a 34-8 win over Cathedral before winning perhaps their biggest game of the season when Cohee rushed for 192 yards in a 14-6 road win at Danvers.They followed the Danvers win with another huge victory as Cohee had 243 yards of offense and two touchdowns and Steve Ullian booted a 22-yard field goal in the waning seconds to beat undefeated Triton, 21-19.The defense then took over from there as Tim Lamusta’s fumble return late in the fourth quarter got the Pioneers a 14-10 win over Amesbury. They then shut down Newburyport, Ipswich and Hamilton-Wenham, holding them to a combined 20 points, to lock up the program’s first playoff berth in over 20 years.”The defense really hasn’t given up a lot of points,” Weidman said. “And they have really played solid all year. We have a lot of experience on that side of the ball and some decent players and they’ve played well.”