How Minneota advanced to the 1A Prep Bowl
Going up against three-time defending state champion Minneota and its 44-game win streak, Mahnomen/Waubun gave the Vikings their best fight of the season in what turned out to be win No. 45, this time 28-14.
“You don’t see a lot of programs that have a 6-4, 220-pound quarterback who plays defensive end on top of it,” said Minneota head coach Chad Johnston, referencing the Thunderbirds’ Blake McMullen, who executed key plays on both sides of the ball for Mahnomen/Waubun. “They did a nice job of not really letting us get to the outside, and we had to earn everything on the inside.”
In the fourth quarter, the Thunderbirds found some momentum as senior Brody Lhokta barreled into the endzone for the 2018 state champs’ second score of the day with nine minutes to play. But Minneota showed off why its a three-time defending Prep Bowl champion, able to come up big when it counted most.
Senior Easton Johnson came away with the game-sealing interception to shutter the Thunderbirds’ chances at an improbable, but not impossible, comeback.
Johnson, whose 7-yard touchdown run opened the scoring in the first quarter, hopes he can dust off Saturday’s semifinal as fast as he and teammate/Vikings’ leading rusher Kellen Bradley run on the field. Tonight, he’s performing as Jacob Bradley, along with a few other roles, in the Minneota drama department’s performance of “Ebenezer Scrooge’s Big Minneota Christmas Show.”
“The advantage of playing the early game, I don’t have to rush back and get back, so I got some time to kill,” Johnson said. On returning to the Vikings fifth consecutive Prep Bowl (they were runner-up in 2021, too): “We’ve got such high standards as a community. Being able to go back there for the fifth time in a row feels pretty good.”