When I go out to cover games here in Bulloch County or beyond, I conduct myself though a certain code of journalistic ethics.
    I do my best to be honest, let both sides tell their story and to never personally question things I’m not in the locker room to experience. But above all, I take pride in remaining an objective observer in all athletic contests — something that’s increasingly absent in sports journalism and journalism period nowadays.
    I’m sure there are plenty of fans out there who enjoy the “homer” broadcaster or columnist, but that’s doing a disservice to the reader. Our job, even as the opinion giver, is to give you the full story — even if it’s the part you don’t want to hear.
    You don’t benefit anything from hearing half the story. That makes you ill-informed — another epidemic I’ve seen plague society over the past couple years. I see this troublesome trend and want to do everything in my power to make sure my readers are the most informed ones out there — whether they like it or not.
    However, I’m sad to say my integrity as an objective journalist was compromised this past Friday.
    There I stood, not sat, in the Donnell Woods press box watching the Statesboro High School football team drive down the field with clenched, sweaty palms. A ball of stress sat at the bottom of my stomach like a red-hot anvil — any minute I was ready to throw up the five-dollar box special I ate at Taco Bell a couple hours earlier from the stress on my nerves.
    There I stood, actively rooting for Statesboro to finally snap their 14-game losing streak. Let me be clear, I’m not from Statesboro — I’ve lived here for barely a year. Yet here I was watching them with the intent and fervor I would my alma mater South Carolina or my childhood pro team Houston Texans.
    What was wrong with me?
    Yes, following SHS week-to-week gives me some kind of connection to them but I’ve always made a point to keep enough distance not be attached to a fan would be. But on that final drive in Hinesville, I couldn’t help but mutter under my breath,
    “Come on Statesboro. You’ve got this.”
    I didn’t realize it in the moment, but my objectivity had been derailed by watching this team battle back and forth with Liberty County in one of the craziest football games I’ve ever seen.
    Let me explain to you the sequence of events Statesboro had to overcome just to get to that final drive.
    The Herald could have paid me double my salary to fictionally write up a worse way to start a football game and I wouldn’t have come close to what happened to Statesboro. In the span of 30 seconds, they:
    Gave up a 15-play, 80-yard touchdown drive with three third down conversions — eating 6:15 off the clock.
    Muff the ensuing kickoff out of bounds — at the one-yard line.
    Get tackled in their own endzone for a safety the play after muffing the kickoff.
    Give up an 85-yard kickoff return for a touchdown after the safety.
    I’ve been watching football for a long time and have never seen a sequence of events like that. I’ve lost football games on my Xbox in less heartbreaking fashions than that opening sequence. Not in my wildest fantasies did I think Statesboro would bounce back, but somehow they did.
    Statesboro would go on to score 20 unanswered points to end the first half. They’d come out in the second half and trade haymakers with Liberty County in a way I’m sure Statesboro fans haven’t seen since 2013. Even as someone who tried to remain objective, I was inspired by the fight in the Blue Devils.
    They were playing like a team desperate not to see the likes of 0-15. Even as they saw an interception be returned for a touchdown to put Liberty County up 36-34, Statesboro still found a way to drive themselves down to the Liberty County 26 with five seconds to go.
    As SHS inched their way down the field on that last drive, my objectivity melted away and navy blue horns slowly sprouted from the top of my head. I wanted SHS to finally break the streak, lift up the spirits of a community and try to revive a football tradition which seems all but lost to history now.
    But as Caleb Dowden lined up for that 43-yarder to end all the pain, I had my doubts about it going in. Not because I found Dowden to be incompetent at his job — he most certainly is not — but because I had seen Statesboro do nothing but lose since I moved here.
    It’s all I really know about them, even with the knowledge of their past prowess. I'm sure after three years of four-win football, some fans, players, and teachers feel the same way too.
    I then watched Dowden’s line-drive kick batted by the hands of a Liberty County edge rusher and their entire sideline erupted in jubilation over their win. As I waded my way down the Liberty County bleachers, sifting through cheering fans, my objectivity had never been more compromised when I walked across the field to see Statesboro head coach Jeff Kaiser, whose pain radiated off his glazed eyes like the glare on a television screen.
    It must take a lot to hurt a man that large. He could barely put together a sentence when I tried to squeeze a couple of quotes out of him for my game story. It hurt to watch him be suffocated by defeat and I felt his pain.
    So let me apologize to the reader if my game story wasn’t objective enough. I’ll be the first to admit after seeing victory escape Statesboro’s clasps so many times last year, I didn’t think there would be another way to surprise me. But Statesboro did surprise me, in a way I didn’t think they could anymore.
    They made me care about them on an emotional level, comprising my integrity as a journalist. After watching the winless team fight so hard only to be undone by a blocked kick, I couldn’t help myself as someone who loves football and underdog stories.
    So I will do my best going forward not to be caught up in the emotions of a game again, but this Statesboro team makes it very hard. So as an objective journalist, I’ll end on this note.
    That win is coming for Statesboro. I don’t know when it’ll come, but it’s coming this season.