Celebration penalty costs high school football team a state title

Update: The Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association has determined that there is no provision to overturn the call once a game has ended. The group's statement also said that players and coaches had been warned repeatedly during the season and before the start of this game that the rule would be strictly enforced.

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A Massachusetts high school lost a state championship game because a player raised his arm in triumph as he ran for what would have been a go-ahead touchdown.

The penalty for the gesture by Cathedral High School quarterback Matthew Owens in Saturday's Division 4A Super Bowl left the losing team Tuesday waiting for word from the state association on whether the school could challenge the referee's decision.

Blue Hills Regional Technical School won the game 16-14. That school's athletic director, Ed Catabia, told The Boston Globe that the referee made "a great call, the right call."

"We try and play by the rules, and the rule is 'no celebrating,'" he said.

“There was nothing dishonorable about the play," Owens' father, Kenneth, told the Boston Herald.

The referee was enforcing a sportsmanship rule that prohibits players from celebratory or taunting behavior while scoring a touchdown.

With Cathedral trailing 16-12, the 18-year-old senior was racing for a score with about six minutes left in the game. The penalty nullified the touchdown, and Owens threw an interception on the next play. Cathedral later got a safety and the ball back for one last chance, but lost the ball on downs.

Cathedral's athletic director James Lynch said the quarterback's instinctive move to raise his hand for a few strides as he approached the end zone could not be reasonably interpreted as excessive celebration, taunting or malicious.

"I just give people the analogy: imagine a basketball player making a clutch three-pointer right at the end of the game, and he turns around and he just kind of shakes his fist in the air kind of thing," Lynch told The Associated Press on Tuesday. "And it was simply just that and it was nothing else ... I don't think it was anything further than just excitement on the player's behalf."

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