Last night, it struck me how different it feels going 10-0 in 2025 than it did in 2009. I think you just hit the nail on the head as to why, whether that's what you intended or not.
In 2009, the prospect of going 10-0 was all anyone around PN-G or the Golden Triangle broadly could talk about the last three or four weeks leading up to the Central game as we kept piling up wins, and then it was all anyone could talk about during that year's playoff run (which was cut way too short) and all offseason afterward.
This week, going 10-0 almost went unnoticed. I made a post about the historical significance on Facebook yesterday, partly just to remind everyone how historically significant that milestone is because it didn't seem like many PN-G fans were taking notice. I hardly saw anyone talking about how important that record is beforehand (really only a few posters on this site). Nonetheless, the record doesn't seem to be generating the excitement that it did 16 years ago. The stands last night were the case in point--they were almost empty halfway through the fourth quarter. But in 2009? The only people who left the PN-G stands in the fourth quarter of that game were the guy who had the heart attack and his family.
Some of that is due to the difference in the importance of the last games of the season between 2009 and now. We knew going in that the Central game was going to be a slugging match and it delivered. We knew going into last night's game versus Dayton that we would most likely dominate all game and we did. The Central game was set to decide the district championship and the D1 playoff seeding for our district. Last night, we entered the game with the district title and our playoff seeding already in hand. Plus, for Central, that game was originally supposed to be the last one at the Babe and, for PN-G, there was unfinished business left over from the 2008 game. There were no equivalent circumstances factoring into last night's game.
Still, I told my girlfriend last night I thought the difference in the reactions then versus now had to do with how the Indians had done the seasons prior to 2009 versus how they've done the last few seasons. In 2009, we were still dealing with the fallout from the coaching change. (Some would argue that never truly went away.) We had gone 3-6 in 2008 and hadn't had a season with more than eight wins since 1999. In 2025, we've got a head coach with a .893 winning percentage, we haven't fallen short of the third round of the playoffs since COVID, we have two state championship appearances and a state title win to our credit over the last three seasons, and we've recently strung together the second longest win streak in school history at 22 games. Not to mention all the stats you just tabulated about how much we're scoring on average, how much we're giving up on average, the average margin of victory, etc.
Whether we realize it or not, our expectations have dramatically shifted over the last five years. And I, for one, think that's a good thing.
One might even call that the mark of a dynasty in the making.