De La Salle's streak over, but the sun will come up

The coach of the Bellevue, Wash. team gave most of the credit to his offensive line.
SEATTLE (AP) -- A California football team's 151-game winning streak, the nation's longest, ended Saturday when Bellevue High School beat the De La Salle High of Concord, Calif., 39-20 before a crowd of 24,987 at Qwest Field.
De La Salle had not lost a game since falling in the 1991 North Coast Section championship game Dec. 7, 1991, when the current seniors on the team were in kindergarten.
The De La Salle Spartans broke the nation's previous longest winning streak at 72 games in 1997, going on to more than double it.
Gracious in defeat
Coach Bob Ladouceur, who now has a 287-15-1 record in a quarter century at the suburban San Francisco school, was gracious in defeat.
"The team we saw on film was not the team we played out there tonight," he said of the three-time defending state 3A championship Wolverines.
"Their coaching staff and players did a great job in every facet and gave us schemes we had never seen," he said. "We got beat by a better football team tonight. If we played them tomorrow, they'd beat us again."
Ladouceur said it was just time for De La Salle to finally lose. "I'm all for there being a lot of king of the hills, not just one," he said. "Bellevue represented their state well."
De La Salle got off to a solid start by moving the ball down the field 83 yards to score with relative ease.
But Bellevue senior J.R. Hasty took the ensuing kickoff 74 yards to score.
The Wolverines were motivated.
"There were all the Internet polls, the message boards where everyone said they were going to blow us out," said linebacker E.J. Savannah, who led Bellevue's defense with nine tackles.
Bellevue coach Butch Goncharoff said his team was thoroughly prepared for the school's biggest game ever.
"This is a great feeling," he said. "We worked eight months for this. I don't think we were intimidated coming in and our kids executed. We've said the strength of this team is our offensive line and it was tonight. They spent more time, more hours than anybody. Even De La Salle."
The streak -- the longest in perhaps any sport -- created a near-cult following for Ladouceur. The program at the private, all-boys school has inspired two books, a documentary and national telecasts of games, and last month earned the Spartans a seven-page spread in Sports Illustrated.
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