Sandwich coach Jason VanPelt did not require much convincing on the call of the game Friday.

Fourth and short from their own 29-yard line, up two, clock bleeding away late in the fourth quarter, 3:46 left?

Braden Behringer and the Indians wanted the ball.

“He asked us if we wanted to go for it and we all said yeah we do. It was a short conversation,” said Behringer, Sandwich’s senior quarterback. “We kind of weren’t able to stop them. We decided to put it in our own hands.”

The decision, albeit a bold one, proved the correct one. Behringer surged behind the middle of his line for the first down. Sandwich’s Nick Michalek capped off a sensational 218-yard night by converting two more firsts, and the Indians ran out a 32-30 win over visiting Plano.

Sandwich (1-2, 1-0 Kishwaukee River Conference) ran out the final 5:46 to salt away its fourth consecutive win in the rivalry that dates back to 1897.

“We needed to drive our feet, play our butts off, all we had to do was get that first down,” Sandwich senior fullback/linebacker Jeffrey Ashley said. “Coach was wondering if we should either go for the punt and stop them on defense or risk it and get the first down. We were like ‘Hey coach, we got it.’”

“We thought we could make it. We knew if we made it the game was probably over,” said VanPelt, holding the game ball after his first win as Sandwich head coach. “Our guys wanted to go for it and we believe in them.”

The 114th edition of the “War on Rt. 34″ was a wild one, the teams swapping the lead six times with a number of long touchdowns and stellar individual efforts.

Michalek rushed for 218 yards and two touchdowns, Ashley 127 yards and two scores for Sandwich. For Plano (0-3, 0-1), Kolten Schimandle rushed for 162 yards on 20 carries and two touchdowns and Dylan Saunders threw two TDs.

The sixth lead change, and what proved the game-winning score, came on Ashley’s 6-yard rumble to cap a 10-play, 67-yard drive for a 32-30 lead with 8:46 left.

“It was a great game, honestly,” Ashley said.

Ashley, Sandwich’s leading tackler as a junior, has added fullback to his duties this season.

A busy night, sure, but he looked the part of a running back on the first play of the second half, a 73-yard TD run.

“Last year, a few years before, I was never a running back. I was just a lead blocker if they needed me,” Ashley said. “I had Nick Michalek helping me out the entire time just telling me to drive my feet and hold onto the ball.”

Plano, as it did throughout the night, answered Sandwich’s final score on its last fateful drive.

Schimandle broke off runs of 30 and 27 yards, and after the Reapers lost 19 yards on a run Saunders completed a 16-yard pass to set up a 21-yard field goal for the lead.

It was never attempted, a high snap preventing Isiah Trujillo from kicking his second field goal.

“That’s football, right?” Plano coach Kyle Tutt said. “We had the lead for a long time tonight. I liked a lot of things we did. We came a kick away from being one point up.”

Schimandle and Michalek had TD runs of 62 and 65 yards, respectively, in the final 25 seconds of the first quarter to set the stage for the back-and-forth game.

Michalek’s 28-yard TD run in the second quarter pushed Sandwich back ahead, but Schimandle scored from a yard out, fourth and goal on the last play of the first half, for a 21-20 Plano lead.

Saunders threaded the needle to sophomore Cooper Beaty for a 23-yard TD on third and long to give Plano its last lead, 27-26, with 9:22 left in the third, where it remained for over a quarter.

“Dylan didn’t have the weeks he wanted in the past two weeks and he took it upon himself to really have a big week,” Tutt said. “And Kolten was right there. I thought he ran harder than he’s run in a really long time.”