THIS one feels like extra time — coming so soon after their semi-final meeting in the Ben Francis Cup.

Yet the players, the fans and indeed the media will relish it even more. After all, it is the big one — the reason there is a rural area schoolboy football calendar — so while this daCosta Cup final presents Clarendon College with a chance to equal the score with STETHS, one trophy apiece, it will rightly feel like the ultimate victory should they manage to come out on top this evening in Montego Bay.

Defeat to STETHS in the Ben Francis Cup was hard for Clarendon College, evidenced by the number of players who wailed inconsolably at the end of the game, some even lying on the pitch at Juici Park. It caused a number of their own supporters to question their right to wear the tag of pre-season favourites. But, conscious of the reality that redemption day lurks around the corner, it didn’t take long for the players to haul themselves off the ground.

The daCosta Cup, not the Ben Francis Cup, the Olivier Shield or even the lucrative LIME Super Cup, is the reason teenage boys give up or shorten their summer holidays to spend two months away from their families in what at times can feel like a fitness boot camp, rather than pre-season training. They spend these summer days trying to impress whistle-bearing coaches, who drill them sometimes twice per day, even as they battle fiercely, but respectfully, with potential teammates to make the final cut. Yet even throughout this mentally and physically taxing routine, these youngsters, at least the fittest of them, remained steadfast, with one goal in mind: winning the daCosta Cup.

With that opportunity now staring them dead in the face, the pulse is now racing, cheetah-style, with a deep a sense of accomplishment occupying their minds. A milestone has been reached, it seems to suggest. Still, the journey is incomplete, not without that syrupy taste of victory. The focus, then, is squarely on this encounter. No time to glance backwards or sideways. Even a ‘prips’ forward, as motivating as it may be, can prove catastrophic because complacency is a hell of a stumbling block. One minute you are hoisting the trophy above your head, the next your legs are cut right from under your body; the trophy slips and your opponent is right there, with palms wide open, to rescue it from the fall. So, in preparation for this championship decider, anything that happened pre-November 22 is likely to be declared null and void. All these players will (or should) be thinking about is the big occasion; their chance to shine; their chance to paint their names on the walls of history.

Two decades from today, when the fans reflect on the winners of this year’s daCosta Cup competition, only the stats-monger will remember days like STETHS 3-1 defeat to Jamaica College in the semi-final of the LIME Super Cup. Or Clarendon College’s penalty shoot-out agonies against Holy Trinity High and STETHS. The highlights that will dominate the memory bank will be the images of that great goal, the tragic error or (faith forbids) that bad refereeing decision which are likely to decide the destination of the trophy.

By beating Glenmuir High to win their fifth successive Ben Francis Knockout title, STETHS would have papered over the cracks from their Super Cup failure. People will just look at them and say JC is the better team, while recommending that they (STETHS) find a way to best their urban area counterparts in all-island competitions.

For Clarendon College, beating parish rivals Glenmuir, with such a commanding performance, to reach the daCosta Cup final would have earned them a stay of execution; atonement for that horrible performance against STETHS in the Ben Francis semi-final. Post-match, all the fans inside Juici Park, and those on social media, could talk about is the eagerly awaited pilgrimage to the Second City this afternoon.

So with the slate wiped clean, the stage has now been set for the daCosta Cup champions-in-waiting to hog the headlines. They are the team that everybody in rural Jamaica will be talking about in the coming months – even if Manning Cup champions Jamaica College, for a second season in a row, were to run riot in the season-ending Olivier Shield play-off.