Liam Taylor has been bracing himself for this. It whirls through his mind that this will be the last time he will wear shoulder pads. It will be the last time he will put on a football helmet. The last time he will practice. The last time he will play football.

The 5-foot-10, 190-pound Haverford High School senior tailback admits he has been taking mental snapshots, trying to inhale each fleeting moment, before they fade past his eyes from light to shadow. The thoughts paralyze him sometimes.

Then he catches himself with this: He is on the verge of something special Thursday in the Fords’ traditional Thanksgiving Day game at Central League rival Upper Darby at 10 a.m. Only two players have ever rushed for more than 5,700 career yards in the long history of Delaware County high school football. Taylor is one of them. The other is former Cardinal O’Hara star Kevin Jones, the 2004 NFL first-round draft choice who now is a professor at his alma mater, Virginia Tech.

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On Thursday, Taylor will need 79 yards to break Jones’ Delaware County career rushing record of 5,790 yards. Taylor enters the game with 5,712 career yards after establishing the single-season Delaware County record — previously held by Interboro graduate Abu Kamara (2,832) — when he rushed for 3,006 yards last season as a junior.

Against eight- and nine-man defensive fronts designed to stop him this season, Taylor has been “held” to 1,950 yards rushing this year.

Breaking the record will not be easy, Taylor says. Not only will Upper Darby try everything to stop him from surpassing that mark, but it also will be his last football game. He has opted, despite recruiting attention from numerous colleges, to not play football beyond Thursday.

He realizes he will be saying goodbye to a part of himself.

“That’s the hard part,” he said. “I look forward to practice. I have been playing football for 10 years, since I was in second grade. When I think about it, other than going to school for 12 years, it is the longest thing I have ever done in my life. It’s why I am looking forward to this Thanksgiving Day game. This will be like a backyard game you play with your friends after school. When we lost to Council Rock South [27-7 in the opening round of the District 1 Class 6A playoffs on Oct. 31 in Newtown], that hit hard. I know we had one more game to play. But it was a long bus ride back. We didn’t play any music.

“I love football. I’m trying to savor everything right now. Last year and this year have been a lot of fun. I decided over the spring not to play in college. I’ll miss it, and I am not fully over it. I never really gave it a thought of playing college football. It was difficult to make the decision, but I definitely would not call it an internal civil war, because I knew what I wanted. Every Saturday morning waking up after games was a very sore day. It was definitely a part of my decision. It was not a huge part of it. It’s hard to let something you love go. I’m ready for it, though.”

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Taylor said posting stats such as his does not happen without help. He noted he would not be going anywhere without senior tackles Rocco Kelleher and Oliver Clune, senior guard Brendan Walker, junior guard Joe McGinley, senior center Emmet Gillespie, and rotating senior tackle and guard Liam McCloskey.

Haverford coach Luke Dougherty has been the buffer for incoming colleges interested in Taylor. Dougherty, who is in his fifth season at the helm and eighth overall with the program, had to tell coaches his star player was not interested in playing college football.

After his junior year, Taylor, who carries a weighted 4.7 GPA, was attracting Patriot and Ivy League attention. As this season progressed, Taylor has only strengthened his resolve not to play college football, Dougherty said. It gave Taylor a newfound freedom on the field, playing without feeling the scrutiny of college recruiters.

“Liam can easily play college football at a lot of places, and when we revisited his decision in early October, he told me, ‘Coach, I am dead set on my decision not to play college football. I’m loving this,’” Dougherty said. “The Patriots and Ivys all liked Liam, but it never reached the formal offering process because by that time, when he did not go to any of the college camps he was invited to, word was out. Penn came here for Liam. Cornell came in three or four times. Bucknell came to the building.

“College coaches are a little different. They can’t understand someone as talented as Liam not wanting to play college football. Coaches are still coming in asking, ‘Is Liam still not interested in playing college football?’ It was shock for a lot of these guys.

“Penn’s [offensive line coach] Kyle Metzler, who recruits our area, probably said it best when he told me, ‘There are a lot of people who go to really good schools who don’t play football and make a lot of money in this world. God bless Liam, he knows what he wants, because we have too many guys at Penn who come here thinking that they have a meal ticket to the NFL and we try to convince them that they’re here for the four-year Penn education. This isn’t a transfer portal launching pad.’”

Many schools still left their information for Dougherty in case Taylor changed his mind. Taylor has not changed his mind. He wants to go to Georgia, his the alma mater of his father, Eric.

“I have been playing football for 10 years … it is the longest thing I have ever done in my life. It’s why I am looking forward to this Thanksgiving Day game. This will be like a backyard game you play with your friends after school.”

Liam Taylor said of playing his final football game

Special motivation

Taylor comes from special genes. His father, a former Haverford star, is the son of former Springfield (Delco) coach Rick Taylor. His maternal grandfather is Jan Stefanski, the brother of Eddie Stefanski, the former Bonner-Prendergast and Penn basketball star and 76ers general manager who is the father of Cleveland Browns coach Kevin Stefanski.

In January, Eric was diagnosed with cancer. It is under control. He received immunotherapy for three months. Progress has been made. He is still receiving chemo maintenance.

Liam entered his senior year with that on his mind.

Eric did not miss a game this season.

“I was mad because this is something I couldn’t do anything about, but my dad inspires me. He inspires me every day,” Liam said. “Thinking about it, I suppose I took his mind off what he was going through. My dad loves seeing me play. He is always on my mind. If playing helped him get through this, that’s all I care about. We talk about breaking the record all the time. My whole family is going to be there. I’ll be thinking about my dad. We get to gather around a high school football game and not think about real life.

“This won’t be easy. It will be good. Hopefully I break the record, and everyone will be happy. It will be sad because I’ll be taking off a Haverford uniform for the last time.”

Eric, a 1990 Haverford graduate and longtime Upper Dublin assistant coach and special education teacher, is bracing himself for the end of Liam’s football career, too. Because of the cancer treatments, he missed Liam’s lacrosse games last spring and could not travel to see his daughter, Emma, pitch for Yale’s softball team.

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“For three hours every Friday night, I don’t know who was more excited for games, me or Liam,” said Eric, who has been on a medical sabbatical from Upper Dublin. “He inspires me, seeing the things he does on a football field and how well he plays. Our whole family was able to come out and watch games. I was never able to beat my dad at Springfield when I played at Haverford, but Liam beat them his junior year. Liam wants to go south, and he wants to enjoy his college experience.

“It is tough not watching him play in college. He is so good. He could play in college. We’re going to have to adopt another kid to watch. We have had that talk. He can come home from college and play in the local softball bar league. You can’t do that with football. This is it. He’s OK with it. It was tough. There were conversations. We were looking for him to change his mind.”

But Eric and his wife, Christa, raised Liam to have a mind of his own.

“That’s why he will be great at anything he does,” Eric said. “He is kind of special. He says I’m his inspiration. He’s my inspiration, too. But where the speed comes from, I don’t know. It’s certainly not from the Taylor side. I see my wife run, too, so I don’t know where he gets it.”

Then Eric recalled a story about Liam when he first began playing football.

Eric or Christa would drop him off and pick him up after practice was over. They had to shuttle their daughters around and rarely had time to sit and watch Liam’s practices. One time Christa, who is Haverford’s field hockey coach, happened to arrive at football practice just before it wrapped up one evening. The team was finishing its sprints, and she noticed something.

Christa recalls going down to the field and asking Liam, “Are you OK?” Liam looked up at his mom and said, “I’m OK, why?” Christa replied, “Because you’re last. Listen, you don’t always have to be first, but you can’t be last.”

After that, every time Christa and Eric picked up Liam, he was in front.

He’s been front and center, it seems, ever since.