Sometimes the parts involved in the creation of something are larger than the whole. For the eighth time in nine tries, Thomas County Central defeated Marist again last Friday night.

I’m not sure even most Yellow Jacket fans understand the magnitude of that sentence. Marist head coach Alan Chadwick has coached his War Eagles in 511 games. He’s only lost 80 times.

Eight of those came against Central.

Nobody else comes even close to being able to make such a claim. Based on percentages alone, Central has been more successful against Marist and Chadwick than any other team in Georgia.

And the other part of that story is that the majority of Central’s wins against Marist have come when the stakes were about as high as they could get, in the state semifinals. Again, nobody else can make that kind of claim.

I do not understand the alchemy involved when these two programs play each other, but it’s almost like you’re guaranteed to have an instant classic on your hands. With the exception of one game Central won by 18 points in 1997, almost every other game has been decided by one score or less.

This latest installment was no exception.

The thing about Marist is when you first eyeball them running onto the field for pregame warmups, you always make the mistake of thinking “is this all they’ve got?” I mean, they are never particularly big or overrun with what appear to be top-tier athletes.

But as Central head coach Justin Rogers said before this game, “it’s all an illusion.”

Marist are the masters of being deceptive. The triple-option offense they run is a thing of surgical precision. One particular jet sweep they ran during the game was executed with such perfection my color commentator on the radio, Bryan Davis, looked at me and said “I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anything quite like that.”

The War Eagles don’t do much, but what they do is done perfectly, almost to the point of being machine-like. Because of what they do on offense, they speed the game up considerably, banking on the fact that you will not be able to diagnose their sleight of hand enough to keep them from scoring and that you won’t get your hands on the ball enough times to outscore them.

They didn’t count on Central out-scoring them 13-7 in the first half, which would end up being the final score.

The other thing Marist didn’t count on was the incredible, phenomenal, head-shaking performance from the Central fans. Hundreds of Yellow Jacket faithful were lined up ready to get inside that stadium a full three-hours before the game, their ‘Horns of Jericho’ that have become a thing now in hand.

Central’s team does this thing where hours before the game the team gathers in one end zone, interlocks their arms, and walks arm in arm from one end zone to the other. As they did that last Friday night, Central’s fans could see them through the buildings. As the team walked en masse, the sound of those infernal horns began to grow en masse as well, building to a crescendo as they finished.

One player confided after the game that hearing them gave him chills because he knew ‘The Jacket Nation’ was again there to support them and take over that stadium.

And did they ever. Just as they’ve done with every away game the last two seasons, Central’s fans simply overtook Marist’s home field in overwhelming numbers and ear-splitting volume. As Rogers told me in his pregame interview on the radio, “we’ve played a bunch of games on the road, but we haven’t played an away game yet.”

With their 13-7 win, Central will now play in their first state championship game in 21 years, this time within the massive confines of Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta. The anticipation and excitement around the opportunity is growing by the minute.

And while I have no idea how that game will turn out, I have no question that once again that Jacket Nation will be there in even fuller force than they have been to support their team with a passion that is quickly becoming as much a part of the Yellow Jacket lore as all of those heart-stopping games against Marist.