High school football team wins after scoring 29 points in 5 minutes in fourth quarter

Here’s the final tally of an amazing comeback that took all of five minutes in a Minnesota high school state football game:

• Three recovered onside kicks
  
  
• Four touchdowns
  
  
• One two-point conversion
  
  

Perhaps most astonishing of all: It was all done in a 5-minute span. St. Michael-Albertville trailed Edina 28-0 midway through the fourth quarter of Friday’s game, but the Knights ended up winning 29-28.

“I’ve got a couple guys on the staff who have coached for a long time and they said they’ve never seen anything like it,” St. Michael-Albertville coach Jared Essler told the Minneapolis Star Tribune. “We’ve got another week to practice together. It’s a chance to build on this excitement.”

The Star Tribune noted that the Knights scored their first touchdown on a 4-yard run by Desean Phillips with 6:32 left in the fourth quarter. They then recovered three consecutive successful onside kicks and scored touchdowns after each. The final touchdown came with 1:31 to play.

Essler told the Star Tribune he started to believe when his team got the second onside kick.

“Once we got that kick, I knew it would get really interesting,” Essler said. “And if we scored then, I had it in my head to go for two. And we did. We got the two-pointer by about 3 inches. I felt like we needed to keep the momentum, keep up the pressure.”

You can watch the highlights and the onside kick recoveries in the video above.

This story was originally published November 5, 2018 at 9:59 AM.