Canfield is patient, unselfish and a success.

The football team’s 33-7 playoff loss to Kenston on Friday stings, but Canfield (11-2) should be commended for going to back-to-back regional finals, beating nine teams with winning records along the way in 2018.

The way Canfield reached those heights deserves kudos as well. While the Cardinals have their share of elite athletes, they lack a star who carries the team and lights up the stat sheet. Canfield makes up for it in wins.

The Cardinals spread the wealth and everyone wins. The Cardinals used two different quarterbacks this year in Max Dawson and Mehlyn Clinkscale, neither of whom saw time under center last year. Any time the team needed to plug and play, things worked out and nobody complained.

“I don’t care what happens. Mehlyn is my dude. Everyone on this team, I love to death,” Dawson said. “It doesn’t matter if I’m on the bench like I was last year. Just being out here and being a part of this team, it means everything to me.”

There are probably a few coaches who would bargain with the devil to hear one of their players say something like that. The buy-in Cardinals coach Mike Pavlansky gets from his team is admirable and he really needed it with the team he had returning this fall.

“We had three starters back on defense. We didn’t have a linebacker or a secondary guy back. Offensively, we had one lineman back. We lost our quarterback. We lost our tailback and our wideouts,” Pavlansky said. “For our seniors to hold this group together, keep believing and to get back here — it’s the second time in school history [that we made the regional finals for two years in a row] — I couldn’t be more proud of the guys.”

It wasn’t just a simple matter of using incoming players to fill holes. Different players had to be moved around. Take linebacker Tyler Stein, the reigning 220-pound state champion on the wrestling mat. He had to switch from defensive line — where he was a standout. It was no big deal to move. The desire to prove Canfield still had it was.

“We were told all offseason by everybody that we weren’t going to be good. That we had our great senior class last year,” Stein said. “Everybody kept coming in and working because we knew we weren’t going to settle for what everybody said we were going to do.

“The whole time, it was about us. It was about Canfield and not about the noise outside,” he added. “It’s a testament to this program and [Pavlansky] and the work ethic of all our guys.”

It’s about Canfield. That sums up the Cardinals’ culture across all sports and they’ve nailed it.

Canfield fans shouldn’t fret the end of football season as its players have an excellent shot at finding success in other sports, too. The question for Canfield’s wrestling team isn’t if it’s going to win a state title, but how many? While Stein is looking for his second state championship before putting on an Ohio State singlet, running back Nick Crawford and defensive lineman Anthony D’Alesio have a good shot at getting their first titles.

Success at Canfield isn’t just limited to members of its football team. Both the baseball and softball teams could have another regional run in them.

The Cardinals keep rolling because they have the team thing figured out.

Brian Dzenis is a Vindicator sportswriter. Write him at bdzenis@vindy.com and follow him on Twitter, @Brian_Dzenis.