PEABODY – There is a saying in football that every lineman’s dream is to score a touchdown. St. Mary’s senior Nathan Cutone is a fullback, but might as well be a lineman, according to his coach, and he very much envisioned carrying the ball into the end zone.
Mission accomplished.
“I tell him all the time he’s an offensive guard in the backfield,” coach Sean Driscoll said. “He’s been lobbying for two years (to score).”
The squeaky wheel gets the grease and Cutone had his number called on second-and-goal from the 1 in the last minute of the first half. Cutone fought his way across the goal-line to score his first touchdown ever as St. Mary’s defeated Bishop Fenwick, 38-6, at Donaldson Field.
“I’ve been waiting for that all year,” Cutone said. “I’ve been blocking my whole life. They finally gave me one.”
That pretty much made his season, but with the Spartans just trying to grind out yardage in the fourth quarter, Cutone had another 1-yard TD run.
“I really love fullback and I love blocking,” he said, “but I really wanted a TD. I never had a TD and I played football my whole life.”
Any coach would want an unselfish player like Cutone, so Driscoll was thrilled to see him fulfill his scoring dreams.
“He plays the game the way it’s supposed to be played,” he said. “I’m very happy for him getting those TDs. He does a lot of the grunt work. He’s a 4-year kid and we’re going to miss him. It’s good to send him off the right way.”
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The senior players were not the only ones on the field ending their careers, or at least the high school version. Back judge Mike Sullivan officiated his last game after a 42-year run, unless an MIAA Super Bowl assignment comes his way.
“Too many great memories to count,” said Sullivan, a Lynn native and 1976 English graduate who got his start in officiating at the urging of Bart Conlon, a former Lynn Tech principal and highly regarded high school and collegiate official.
“Bart Conlon was my summer baseball coach,” Sullivan said. “When I stopped playing football I was bored. I wanted to be on the field. I called him and he got me going. First-class guy all the way.”
Sullivan, who splits time between Swampscott and Arkansas, has also umpired baseball for 42 years. He retired in 2019 after 25 years as the director of the state Office of Campaign and Political Finance, an agency that ensures politicians follow the rules in their fundraising. Who better than a referee to do that?
“It’s the same job,” he said. “There are rules and regulations and laws and you use common sense to put them into effect and make judgments.”
Exercising common sense is critical in officiating.
“One of the first things I was taught was that if it’s a sweep right, don’t call holding on the left tackle,” he said. “It has nothing to do with the play.”
Sullivan executed both jobs with distinction.
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There are no betting lines on high school games, but if there were, St. Mary’s would have to have been a considerable favorite Thursday. When you have two teams that are relatively evenly matched and one plays in a state semifinal the weekend before Thanksgiving and the other does not, there is a decided advantage for the team coming in with an extra week’s rest.
“It was an advantage for us,” said St. Mary’s Coach Sean Driscoll, whose team lost to Shawsheen in the quarterfinals Nov. 14, while Fenwick lost to Fairhaven in the semifinals Nov. 21.
“It’s a tough system,” said Fenwick coach Dave Woods. “When you lose that last game, it’s tough to bounce back. It’s not an excuse. Everybody (around the state) is in the same boat. I think the system needs to be changed somehow.”
It’s not an excuse, but definitely an explanation. And that is to take nothing away from St. Mary’s, which dominated the game and would have been very difficult to beat under any circumstances. Woods said as much.
“They’re a good team and they controlled the line of scrimmage,” he said. “It was going to be a struggle for us all day to stop the run.”
The roles were reversed in 2018 when St. Mary’s was the team on short rest and had the Div. 7 Super Bowl to look forward to a week later. Driscoll opted not to play most of his starters. Fenwick took it personally and the result was a 60-0 blowout that ratcheted up the intensity in an already fierce rivalry.
There were no such shenanigans Thursday, simply two well-coached teams playing a hard-fought, clean game, in which one of them came in with an advantage and played as if it didn’t matter.
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Fenwick leads the series 28-18-1 – 17-11-1 on Thanksgiving (or the night before). The teams first played in 1964 and for the first quarter-century all the games were played at Fenwick on Thanksgiving morning, with Manning Bowl being used by English and Classical. That led to the creation of the Thanksgiving Eve Classic, giving the Spartans a chance to host the holiday matchup on Wednesday night, an arrangement that is currently in effect.
Both teams played very difficult schedules. Coming into Thursday’s game, the combined record of the teams St. Mary’s lost to was 27-4 (.871) and the teams that had beaten Fenwick were a combined 43-9 (.827).
