AUGUSTA — With the boot in the Cony football team’s possession once again, B.L. Lippert was bluntly honest about where he felt his Rams were a month earlier.

On Sept. 22, Lippert was looking for answers after his Cony football team had given up 483 rushing yards in a five-touchdown loss to Lawrence. This time, after the Rams closed out the regular season with a 28-14 victory over Gardiner, he truly reflected on how far his team had come.

“Four weeks ago, standing here on this field, I’m not sure I felt we were going to be 5-3,” said Lippert, Cony’s eighth-year head coach. “We didn’t play well, and we weren’t very physical. It hadn’t been like that here in a long, long time, but our kids have stuck with it and battled their way back.”

Gardiner challenged Cony in this game as the Rams outgained the Tigers by a mere 402-377 margin Friday in the 145th meeting between the two rivals. Yet it wasn’t enough against a Rams team that has now won 10 of the past 11 games in this rivalry series and will enter the playoffs on a four-game winning streak.

Parker Morin completed 9 of 21 passes for 220 yards, three touchdowns and an interception on offense while also intercepting a pass on defense. Two of his touchdown passes went to Parker Sergent, who had three catches for 153 yards. Anderson St. Onge added 143 rushing yards and a score on 23 attempts.

Cony drove all the way down to the 1-yard line on its opening possession but failed to score as Gardiner delivered a goal-line stand. After the Rams forced a punt that ended in a long return, the home team took the lead on a 7-yard St. Onge run with 4:11 left in the first quarter.

“I knew we would open up with a lot of runs, but I wasn’t expecting to get the ball (as much as I did),” St. Onge said of his performance, in which he ran the ball six times on Cony’s opening drive. “We knew Gardiner had some tacklers and some good linebackers, but our linemen opened up the line, and I just kept running.”

Cony then recovered a Chase Burgess fumble as Gardiner (4-4) was driving and went up 14-0 with two minutes left in the opening quarter on a 76-yard touchdown pass from Morin to Sergent. After a turnover on downs, Morin hit Sergent for a 64-yard score with 7:23 left in the first half to make it 21-0.

Switching from Burgess to Asher Nagy at quarterback, Gardiner finally scored as the first half expired as the sophomore hit Brayden Elliott for a 15-yard score. The Tigers then pulled within seven on their second drive of the third quarter as Nagy threw a touchdown pass to Brady Davidson on fourth-and-12.

“I probably should have run the ball there at the end of the first half and punted with 30 seconds to go, but they went down with 50 seconds, executed a nice screen and scored,” Lippert said. “In the second half, we don’t score on our first drive, and they hit a big play and then score on fourth down. They rallied well.”

Cony, though, responded with a 29-yard touchdown pass from Morin to Killian Arnold with 4:19 left in the third quarter on a drive that was interrupted by a 15-minute injury delay. Gardiner wouldn’t get back inside the Cony 40 until the final 30 seconds, and a Lance Theriault interception immediately followed to end it.

The two-quarterback approach, one that Gardiner has used before this season in games against Messalonskee and Nokomis, certainly tested the Cony defense. Nagy completed 8 of 20 passes for 197 yards and the two scores, and Burgess had a solid night running with 14 carries for 112 yards.

Cony’s Parker Sergent, left, and Killian Arnold celebrate a touchdown on a pass play against Gardiner during a football game Friday in Augusta. Joe Phelan/Kennebec Journal

“I thought Burgess ran the ball really well, and we’re lucky he fumbled that one on that big run in the first quarter,” Lippert said. “We thought we had a good plan for him, but he’s a good athlete, and he was able to make our guys miss. Nagy, he’s a good passer, and he hit a couple balls to set them up in scoring range.”

Cony now leads the rivalry, which has been played every year since 1892 with the exception of 1917 (smallpox epidemic) and 2020 (COVID-19), 77-58-10. The only defeat in the past 12 years for the Rams in the rivalry matchup came in a 13-7 overtime loss to the Tigers in 2017.

The win means the No. 3 seed in the Class B North playoffs for Cony, which will host Mt. Blue (0-8) in the Class B North quarterfinals next Friday. Gardiner, which ends the regular season on a three-game losing streak after a 4-1 start, will host Skowhegan (2-6) in the other quarterfinal matchup.

It’s an impressive turnaround for Cony, which looked set for a losing season the likes of which the program hasn’t seen lately as recently as a few weeks ago. Healthier now with players such as Josh Kidd, who had two sacks Friday, back in action, the Rams are where they want to be as the postseason begins.

“With the way we were struggling at the beginning of the season, it’s pretty great to turn things around to where we are now,” said Sergent, who was named game MVP by the Great American Rivalry Series. “The real football starts now. It’s playoffs, and we want to keep it going.”