Deerfield 35, Maine West 6

It may have been Maine West's senior night, but for a while it looked like a couple of Deerfield juniors were having all the fun.

In fact, in the first half, Deerfield junior Brian Miller ran in 3 touchdowns and kicked the extra points to put the visitors up 21-0 going into the break.

From there, Deerfield carried on to a 35-6 Central Suburban North win to improve to 5-4, 3-2. The Warriors will have to wait until later on today to see if they made the cut when the IHSA announces the playoff pairings.

"It's a tough loss," said Maine West coach Chris Hare, whose team bows out at 1-8, 1-4. "On senior night you want to go out for them. You want the seniors to feel the exhilaration of victory. It would have been nice to have that for them."

After the break, Maine West twice coughed up the football in. Deerfield converted on both turnovers with TD runs of 70 and 20 yards by junior QB Jason Hendel and sophomore Kyle Magnus, respectively.

In Maine West's final drive of the game, a faked punt and fourth-and-7 was turned into a 28-yard run by Nick Abramson. From there, Abramson then took over QB duties from Sean Willett, who rushed for 60 yards.

Andrew Gorordo then caught 2 passes from Abramson of 17 and 22 yards, the second making it into the end zone.

"One thing we try to preach is from the first play to the last play you never let down," Hare said. "Deerfield played a tremendous game but we never quit. We kept playing has hard as we could. I'm going to take some memories of the seniors leaving it on the field."

Maine West's season may be over but first-year coach Hare is hoping to have laid a good foundation.

"There's a lot of things that have to be done," he said. "The building blocks have been laid down. We're going to build this program brick by brick.

"(We're going to) get down to the basics and the fundamentals and build from there. It's going to happen."