A Last Time For Everything: A Senior's Goodbye to the Thanksgiving Day Rivalry

Thanksgiving Day football-- an annual tradition of rival teams in contest.

Here at Catholic Memorial, we compete for the coveted Pumpkin Trophy against BC High on that same day every year. Last year, we hosted a game at Fenway Park. This year, we travelled to the windy campus of BC High in search of the trophy.

Upon arriving at BC High, we were all greeted with cheers from current and former classmates, friends, and family members welcoming us to the coldest Thanksgiving Day game in years.

Despite this incredible tradition, our minds were thinking two weeks ahead to the Super Bowl. After all, it is the first time in 40 years that Catholic Memorial has made it to the state championship. But, we had to stop thinking about this in order to focus on the task at hand: reclaiming the Pumpkin Trophy.

After gearing up, we went to work. Our offense was firing on all cylinders and our defense did their job. They shut out BC High at half in spite of less than ideal conditions. The nonstop wind made us run the ball on offense. We also knew that we needed to be careful when it came to punting. Before the game we practiced some extreme scenarios, just in case the wind was too much.

The temperature was a warm sixteen degrees with nonstop wind, the coldness was on all our minds. During halftime, Coach Dibiaso got our minds off the cold and back to where they needed to be. Both our offense and defense kept trucking along nonstop. We pulled it together and brought the Pumpkin Trophy back home with our 37-15 win on that frigid Thanksgiving morning.

This win meant more to us than just reclaiming the Pumpkin Trophy. It allowed us to finally talk about the Super Bowl this week and made the turkey dinner at home taste a lot better. As a senior, this is my final year being on this team. Every year that I’ve been here, this Thanksgiving Day rivalry game is incredibly competitive. There is always a countdown of how many days until we face BC High on Thanksgiving. You can feel it restart and tick-down each day after.

To others, this team may just look like an ordinary football team, but to me it’s more than that, we’re a family with traditions.