Montville — After all the conversations the Montville High School football team had in the preseason about not hemorrhaging the same number of points it did last season...

...after all the defensive stops the Indians had Friday night against Stonington...

...after Montville seemingly iced the game with an interception with no time left ... only to be flagged for pass interference to set up an untimed down...

...Montville senior co-captain Christian Davis watched from the Stonington backfield as the Bears’ Tyler Burnside was running free across midfield thanks to a series of laterals with no Indians defender near him.

“(I’m thinking), ‘Someone please tackle him,’ ” Davis said. “(Stonington) is past the 50, (Burnside) is sprinting, and I’m like, ‘Holy cow. No way.’”

The Indians still got the stop thanks to a block-in-the-back call on Stonington, and the ball eventually bounced out-of-bounds to give them a 12-7, nerve-wracking Eastern Connecticut Conference Small Division win on opening night.

“You see it coming,” Grove said. “You’re like, ‘They’re going to lateral it. It’s going to be a hook-and-lateral.’ ... and in typical Montville and Stonington fashion, they get three laterals off. One was kind of forward, but it happens. So they get the three laterals off and they get down to like (our) 24.

“The ball came out of bounds, and I picked it up and I wasn’t going to give it to anybody.”

Defense was a major issue for the Indians last season; they surrendered 295 points. They gave up 34 or more points in 11 of their games.

Montville struggled a bit in the first half. The Bears went away from their traditional double wing, run-based offense and threw often out of a pistol set.

The Indians gave up one touchdown early in the second quarter and allowed just six first downs, three of which they gave up on penalties. Junior Jack Ware had two sacks.

“We let up way too many points (last season),” Montville senior co-captain Kevin Murtha said. “We focused on that during the offseason. We knew we had to be better players on defense. ... We put a lot of pressure on our d-backs this week. We knew that they were going to be a deep passing team. We knew that their quarterback (Amadi White), he likes to throw the deep ball, so we knew we had to defnd that. Whether or not we did a good job doing that, the scoreboard shows that we won, but we need to make some improvements.”

Grove was much less critical than Murtha.

“In my 10 years, that’s the most complete defensive effort we’ve ever had,” Grove said.

Andrew Petherick ran 17 times for 87 yards and a touchdown for the Indians and Christian Davis, who moved from guard to fullback, had nine carries for 36 yards and a touchdown.

Montville’s offensive line enabled their running backs. They paved the way for two 13-play touchdown drives, both of which took over seven minutes off the clock. And almost every play was a run.

“Their kids up front did a nice job,” Stonington head coach A.J. Massengale said. “They didn’t do one thing that we didn’t prepare for. We (the coaches) just didn’t do a good enough job preparing our kids.”

Amadi White scored on a 1-yard run for Stonington.

Twitter: @MetalNED