Fitting finish: Joliet Catholic meets its own gold standard with dominant Class 4A title win

DEKALB – From the moment it was announced Joliet Catholic would play in the Class 4A postseason this season, the expectation was one thing and one thing only: a 15th state championship trophy to be added to the lengthy total.

And it happened exactly the way most people scripted it, with the Hilltoppers putting up a dominant performance as they defeated Sacred Heart Griffin, 56-27, on Friday night at Northern Illinois University’s Huskie Stadium.

[ Class 4A state championship: Jordan Anderson’s record-setting day leads JCA to 15th title ]

The Hilltoppers knew going in that was what people expected of them, but the fashion in which they performed Friday, scoring touchdowns on their first five drives and only denied scoring a sixth by the halftime horn, still was impressive. After the break, they scored three more touchdowns in succession, with touchdowns scored on all eight drives that weren’t ended by the game clock either at half or at the final buzzer.

Joliet Catholic coach Jake Jaworski didn’t feel like dwelling on the lofty expectations of others, but acknowledged that his team’s dominant performance in the final did remove a bit of a weight from his own thought process.

“I never heard any of our kids talking about rankings, or that we had a target on our backs or anything like that,” Jaworski said. “But for me, I can breathe a little sigh of relief now, obviously, the expectations were there. We had a special group. It was our job to prepare these kids as coaches, but it was also our job to kind of stay out of the way. Because that’s how good these guys were. It was like, let’s not mess this up.”

The Hilltoppers definitely didn’t mess things up.

And the ability to distill whatever pressure did exist into fuel to light the team’s fire came in handy at times.

“I loved it,” Joliet Catholic linebacker Michael Rouse said. “I liked that everybody wanted to get us. I liked that teams gave us their best shot. It was great tonight for a lot of reasons, for those past Hilltoppers, like those seniors from last year that didn’t get a chance to play for it, and I think would have won it then, too.

“It’s a memory that’s going to last a lifetime, going 14-0 and winning a state championship, it feels spectacular.”

Although the pressure of living up to lofty expectations weren’t spoken about too much, the catharsis of putting the team’s best foot forward on the biggest stage possible was definitely something the Hilltoppers enjoyed.

“It was pressure, definitely. You see on social media things like Joliet Catholic is favored to win. But our team, we just get out there, and we did our job,” Joliet Catholic quarterback Aidan Voss said. “You try to put it out of your head, but you get the notifications: Joliet Catholic will beat a team by 40 points, and then we’ll beat another team by 20, and it will be like, ‘Joliet Catholic isn’t all that.’ We’d try not to let that get into our head and just go out there and play.”

For Jordan Anderson, who finished with a Class 4A state record 306 rushing yards, finally being able to really unleash all the weapons after a season where he grappled with injuries was something to behold.

“I was just going to put my heart out there, I wasn’t going to leave anything out there,” Anderson said. “We never let anything get into our heads, we were just going to do what we do. We were going to go in and do it. We feel like we could have competed in any division.”

It’s fun to imagine how the Hilltoppers may have fared in the larger classifications, but Jaworski isn’t dwelling on what might have been.

“You’d hear it at times, running clock wasn’t good enough, or we didn’t beat somebody like people though we should have. We didn’t let any of that bother us, our goal was to win,” Jaworski said. “Sometimes it isn’t perfect, or it isn’t always a good as you might think it is, or it isn’t always as bad as you thought it was. To go to 14-0 and win a state championship in any class isn’t easy, but its just a testament to our guys and how hard they worked.”