LANGLEY — When you spend your entire high school rugby career growing up in the shadow of Goliath, finally getting a chance to step out into a spotlight of your own can be a little blinding.
“For all these years, Shawnigan Lake has been like a super-hero,” Oak Bay Barbarians’ senior Nick Carson explained on Friday evening. “Just unbeatable. So this means a ton. I knew since the beginning of the season that we could do it. But now that we’re actually here? It’s pretty surreal.”
They’d already beaten the Stags once this season, 20-15 in the Vancouver Island Quad-A final.
Yet taking down the single most reliable program in all of B.C. high school sports in the provincial championship game environment they have come to call their very own by winning it all in eight of the previous nine seasons?