The Week 5 game between Riverton and Lander ended about 74 hours after it began.
Fortunately for both teams, about 72 of those 74 hours were spent with the game under suspension.
The action started Friday night, as is common for a high school football game, and Riverton took a 7-0 lead. However, with 2:36 remaining in the first quarter, lightning delayed the game. With the storm not dissipating, the two teams agreed to restart the game at 6 p.m. Monday.
The final three-plus quarters happened Monday, including an extra bit of overtime in which Lander scored on a 2-point conversion pass on the final play to win 29-28.
This was not the first time in Wyoming’s history that a game stretched across more than one day. It’s happened twice before:
The first came in 1951, when Greybull and Powell played to a 0-0 tie on Oct. 19, then met 11 days later to play the overtime period. The overtime had to be played to decide the conference champion, and Greybull officially won 2-0 by gaining more yards on five plays during the overtime frame than Powell did on its five plays.
The other instance of a Wyoming high school football game lasting more than one day came in 1967. On Oct. 27, Basin defeated Byron 40-34 by scoring in the final minute. But Byron protested the game’s final 2 minutes, 24 seconds after claiming that an official mistakenly applied a rule about fumbles and mistakenly awarded possession to Basin. The WHSAA upheld the protest, and the two teams met three days later to play the final 2:24. In the replay, neither team moved the ball much and neither scored, and the game finished officially as a 34-34 tie.
–patrick