“The night of that show we came off in a big company front—and it was like two fronts, we called it The Battleship—and we turned in a gate so we were facing in the opposite direction when we started,” Bloom said. “And people got on their feet. From the time we played the opener, and the time we went off at the finish line, we pulled off a hell of a show.

“We had nothing to lose. We were playing against senior corps. I was the bass drummer, at the front of the battleship coming off, the horn line was behind us, and there was a guy at the finish line going, ‘Yay! Yay, yay!’ And I’m playing, and I’m saying ‘move, move, move.’ I had to keep going! And I knocked this guy down and walked right over him. I couldn’t move or I’d throw the whole line off. And he was lying on his back, still going like this, ‘Yay! Yay, yay!’”

“It was one of those times where everything clicked,” Warren Alm said. “And it went down in the annals: when everybody asks ‘Can you remember that one?’ so many guys from that era say, ‘Oh yeah! The Bellefontaine show. The best show we ever did.’”

When the places were announced, the Cavaliers found themselves ahead of corps composed of experienced musicians ten, twenty years older, who had recorded top-ten finishes in senior-circuit championships. Their second third-place finish in as many shows—behind only Skokie and Reilly—was all the more sweet because of its improbability. And the crowd echoed that sentiment. “They were up to the sidelines and end lines,” Fiedler marveled, “and on occasion you get part of our drill at the line where we do an about face and come off of it, and the crowd is there. The corps is stepping on toes, marking time, stepping on the crowd, and the crowd is going nuts. They’re so thrilled. It was just a big, big thrilling thing for everybody.”

Well, not everybody. “There were all these senior corps we beat, and they were really kind of perturbed,” Dragland said. “They said some nasty things. They were very disappointed a ‘bunch of kids’ beat them. I remember a guy from Reilly telling some guy from Pittsburgh, ‘They deserved to beat you. They’re better than you.’”

The Cavaliers basked in this glory, but the afterglow grew a bit heated. Word spread some jilted senior corps were building an indoor bonfire at the National Guard Armory. “And they were dancing around it with an Indian head, chanting over it, all of them east coast senior corps, and they were out to get the Skokie Indians or something,” Dragland said. “I remember Don saying we weren’t gonna leave until Skokie got on their buses. And I thought, ‘What are we gonna do? We’re kids.”

But as the corps circled the wagons, and their buses pulled off into the night, bound for Chicago and a winter of rest, Cavaliers kids could drift off to contented sleep, for they’d just made it through a season unlike any other. Outgoing drum major Jarvis Fiedler could bid farewell with a smile on his face, and dreams of his Cavaliers brothers, and conquests still to come. “We thought we were the big kids,” Fiedler beamed, “and we played that way that night.”