The win the Emmaus football team has been waiting for all season finally came Friday night.

For the first time in 2015 the Hornets beat a team with a winning record, taking down Central Catholic 28-21 Friday night in Emmaus.

“We talked about being resilient,” said Emmaus head coach Randy Cuthbert. “It’s not easy when you’re 2-4 and have lost tough games. These guys have hung tough together and worked to get better. I think you can see it on the field. I think we’ve gotten a little bit better, which is huge. We’re going to take it one week at a time but we’ll see what happens.”

Emmaus (3-4) moves to 12th in the Class AAAA District 11 rankings with a trip to Pocono Mountain East (2-5) next weekend.

The Hornets showed the reliance their coach was looking for in the second half Friday night.

Trailing 21-14 since just before intermission, the Vikings (3-4) got no points out of their first two second-half possessions. They took their third possession of the second half 80 yards in 10 plays to tie the game at 21-21 with 5:30 left in the game.

But Emmaus answered, going 73 yards in 11 plays capped by Kyle Boney’s 7-yard touchdown run with 53 seconds left to play.

It was Boney’s fourth touchdown of the game, bringing his season total to 22. He also ran for 296 yards and is now at 1,443 for the season.

“He’s a special player,” said Cuthbert. “A kid that big that can run that fast and make moves and run people over. I don’t think there’s a lot of [defensive backs] in the league that want to come up and tackle him. People pack the box so much, we focus on blocking the big guys – the linemen and the linebackers – and if there’s a guy unblocked, which you can’t block them all, it’s going to be the [defensive back] because they usually want no part of tackling him.”

The Vikings mounted a comeback attempt, but Nolan Marcks picked off an Ethan Persa pass to end the game.

The Emmaus defense came up with one of its best performances of the season to hold Central to 21 points.

“I thought we played tough, played hard,” said Marcks, a second-year starter in the Hornet defensive backfield. “We didn’t get a lot of respect coming into it. We showed up.

“Everyone just did their job. Everyone swarmed to the ball. That’s what we were saying before the game: ‘All 11 to the ball.’ That’s what we did.”

Central Catholic ran a fast-paced offense and tried to utilize its speed. Emmaus took it’s time getting to the line of scrimmage and chewed up as much clock as possible to take advantage of its size and power.

That plan only works if the defense can get off the field, which it did. On five first-half possessions, Central scored just twice. In the second half the Vikes scored just once on four possessions.

“They were phenomenal,” Cuthburt said of his team’s defense. “We didn’t have a ton of team speed and when we played spread teams early in the season we really had a problem on defense. To their credit, these guys have kept working.

“They played sound defense. They kept stuff in front of them and they made tackles. We limited their big plays. A team like this is going to hit some big plays, but I think they were able to limit them really well and get off the field and get the ball back to our offense.”

The Hornets are now on a two-game winning streak with three games left in the season. While a district playoff berth still seems like a long shot, the team is going to take it one game at a time with Whitehall and Parkland on the slate after next week’s trip to the Poconos.

“We were just tired of that losing feeling, having weekends of just being sad,” said Boney. “We made a statement tonight. We started 1-4 and not looking real good. We’re trying to get on a roll right now and get it back, try and show everyone Emmaus is here to stay.”