Johnny O’Brien had an uncharacteristic start to his game Friday.

The Fremd senior quarterback threw an incomplete pass on the first play. He was sacked on the second. O’Brien scrambled for a first down on the third, but on the play lost a fumble.

It hardly precluded another special night.

O’Brien, a Northwestern recruit, threw for 306 yards, 243 in the second half, and four touchdowns.

Fremd scored touchdowns on four consecutive drives in a 31-point first half and went on to a 45-21 win over visiting Lyons in a Class 8A second-round game in Palatine.

“That first drive is not our brand of football,” said O’Brien, who was 21-for-34 passing. “But we knew that it’s a long game.”

Fremd (10-1), now in its first quarterfinal since 2009, advanced to face the winner of Saturday’s Bolingbrook-Warren game.

O’Brien and the Vikings drew on more recent history in overcoming the early hiccup.

“What I thought of after that first drive was last year [a second-round loss to Naperville Central],” O’Brien said. “That game we kind of fell off after that first drive. It was like our mojo went down. The whole thing we were preaching today is no matter what happens in the game, stay up. We can always come back.”

Lyons (8-3), seeking its third quarterfinal in four years, had an early chance to get Fremd on its heels.

After O’Brien’s fumble near midfield, Lyons quarterback Jack Slightom completed five straight passes to drive the Lions inside the Fremd 5-yard line.

But an offensive pass interference penalty in the end zone, and a subsequent procedure penalty backed the Lions up, and a 39-yard field goal was missed.

An illegal block set back Lyons’ second possession that ended in an interception, one of two Lions’ turnovers in the first half.

“We had a lot of penalties in the first half, we were playing behind the sticks a lot and you can’t get that kind of deficit against a team like that,” Lyons coach Jon Beutjer said. “They’re a very good football team with a very good quarterback. The hardest thing is we didn’t play our best game.”

The Lions ran into a bit of an O’Brien buzzsaw after those first possessions.

O’Brien completed five straight passes on Fremd’s second drive to set up a Jayden Faulkner 2-yard TD. O’Brien TD passes of 31 yards to Western Illinois recruit Marquan Brewster, 13 to Faulkner and 65 to Ben Riddle followed.

Lyons got on the board with Slightom’s 6-yard TD pass to Owen Matela, but Shea Sloan hit a 32-yard field goal on the last play of the half to put Fremd ahead 31-7.

“We just love throwing the ball, we practice every day, we love being in moments like this, these big-time games,” O’Brien said. “We’re going to resort to what we’re good at. We’re going to sling the ball.”

O’Brien’s 5-yard TD pass to Riddle finished off the Fremd scoring.

Beutjer knows a thing or two about good quarterback play, having been a standout QB for Wheaton Warrenville South back in the 1990s before playing collegiately at Iowa and Illinois.

He shared a moment with O’Brien afterward.

“I’ve been watching high school for a long time, and obviously I played football myself. And I told him, he’s special,” Beutjer said. “Defensively, we didn’t get to him, they do a good job protecting but he gets rid of it so quickly.”

The Lions also struggled to control possession and keep O’Brien off the field.

Lyons junior running back EJ Kuhlman had averaged 32 carries and 168 yards the last four games, all Lyons wins. But he was held to 31 yards on 12 carries Friday. The Lions had zero total yards rushing.

“That was one of our game plans, was to run the football and to keep him off the field,” Beutjer said. “They did a nice job of stopping our run.”

Slightom was 27 for 41 for 262 yards. Matela, a 6-foot-6 junior tight end, had 13 catches for 145 yards. Kuhlman’s 12-yard TD run in the third quarter and 17-yard TD catch from Slightom in the game’s final minute accounted for Lyons’ other scores.

“Once we got up before the half I just remembered Naperville Central, us in the reverse role. I didn’t want them to sneak back in,” Fremd linebacker Troy Pepe said. “I wanted to keep our foot on the gas defensively and I thought we did a good job of that.”

Beutjer, in defeat, had high praise for his group that reached the second round of the playoffs for the fourth straight season.

“I’m proud of this team. For them to beat Downers Grove North and then beat York two times, we had a lot of guys battling through injuries, proud of their resilience,” Beutjer said. “We ask a lot of our kids from January all the way through now. But against a team like that you have to play good football. And we didn’t play our best football.”