In 1972, Neville played three games in eight days to win the state championship

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Dennis Surratt crouches beneath center, a quarterback second-guessing a play sent in by his coach. The score is 0-0 just before halftime in one of the rarest and longest high school football games ever played. The weather is so bad that the radio announcer says, “Last time it rained like this, somebody built an ark.”

The play, tackle trap left, requires nimble footwork and tricky ball-handling in the wing-T offense. Surratt is worried that he may stumble in mud so thick that the announcers struggle to read the numbers on the players’ jerseys. But he does what his coach orders. He spins 180 degrees, fakes to his fullback slogging right and hands the ball to a halfback running left.

Surratt is not wearing a uniform. He is not on a football field. He is standing in the optical department of a Walmart in Opelousas, La. He is an optometrist and he is wearing a white lab coat, his name stitched across the breast. He is 57, his hair thinner and his waist thicker than at 17, but his memory is as lithe now as his feet were then.

He re-enacts the play from 40 years earlier, hands off the imaginary ball and watches the invisible hole open. His trepidation dissolves as it always does in the retelling. Later, he pushes up the sleeve of his lab coat. He rubs his arm.

“Still get goose bumps,” he says.

On Dec. 1, 1972, Surratt and Neville High School of Monroe in northern Louisiana played a state semifinal game against Brother Martin High School of the renowned New Orleans Catholic League. These were the days before overtime was used. The playoff game ended 0-0. The first tiebreaker, first downs, ended even at 9-9. The second tiebreaker, penetrations of the opponent’s 20-yard line, also finished level, at 1-1. Beyond that, the Louisiana High School Athletic Association had no official way to resolve a game.

So four days later, on Dec. 5, the state semifinal was replayed in its entirety. This time, the rain sheeted and mud spackled the players’ numbers, and their uniforms glistened as if slathered in pudding. Neville won, 8-0. Three days after that, it played its third game in eight days without surrendering a point, winning, 6-0, over Airline High of Bossier City to take the Class AAAA state title for Louisiana’s largest schools at the time.

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