Orange Lutheran has lost one game this season and it lost it by a point. That is the part of its record worth your attention, and it is not the part a standings page shows you.
Orange Lutheran of Orange, our 33rd and sixth in SoCal, plays at Sierra Canyon of Chatsworth, our eighth and second in SoCal, on Friday at 7:00 PM Pacific. The game is at Sierra Canyon School on Rinaldi Street.
The visitor's season, in the order it happened
Orange Lutheran is 3-1, and its own athletics site lays the four games out plainly. It lost 23-22 to Miami Central, our 29th. Then it beat Cathedral Catholic of San Diego 38-24, beat Basha of Chandler, Arizona 23-17, and shut out Serra of Gardena 35-0.
That Basha win has appreciated. When Orange Lutheran got it in August, Basha was the reigning Arizona Open Division champion and sat inside our national hundred. Basha then lost 40-7 to Pinnacle and came off our board entirely this week. A road win at a team good enough to be ranked, against a team that has since stopped being ranked, is a strange asset to hold. It still counts.
Three straight wins since the one point loss, and the loss was to a team we still have 29th.
Sierra Canyon has not been tested the same way
Sierra Canyon is 3-0 and eighth, and it held both of those through a week in which the top six did not move at all.
Second in SoCal is a harder position than it sounds on a board where Santa Margarita is first at 4-0 and Mater Dei is third at 4-0. Sierra Canyon is ahead of Mater Dei nationally and behind it regionally, which is not a contradiction. The regional order and the national order are different instruments and they ask different questions.
The gap is 25 places and the boards disagree about it
Nationally these teams are 25 apart. Regionally they are four apart, second against sixth. Both numbers are ours and both are current, and the regional one is closer to what Friday will feel like.
A SoCal board is a smaller field. Every team on it has played or will play most of the others, so the spacing compresses. The national hundred has room to spread teams out that a ten team state board does not.
What we are watching
Whether the one point loss was the ceiling or the floor. Orange Lutheran has spent a month looking like a team that belongs in a conversation it is not quite in. Friday is the shortest route into it.
