A strange coincidence. Waking up in the middle of the night in Abu Dhabi, turning on the television to see if ESPN Classic was showing a baseball playoffs game … and there was Navy playing Air Force, and I will watch almost any college football game for X number of minutes. Even if it’s several days old.

I am even more likely to watch the service academies, who almost always run old-fashioned triple-option type offenses, with lots of sets and formations and complicated Xs and Os. It’s fun and retro and makes me think of Don Markham and Dick Bruich and Colton and Fontana.

And as the game unreeled (without commercial interruption, which was fantastic), I stuck with it from the middle of the second quarter to the end, and the smallish quarterback for Navy caught my attention. Running the offense well, seemingly indestructible despite lots of hits … and then I heard the CBS announcer mention his name and hometown.

“Kriss Proctor, from Big Bear City California …”

And yes, I know that guy.

I had decided, as this college football season began, that pretty much all of the high school football standouts I saw play while working in Southern California had cycled out of college. Probably because Allen Bradshaw was finally out of USC.

But if we figure that the last season I saw was 2007, the high school seniors in that season would be college seniors (or red-shirt juniors) this season, and sure, I would know Kriss Proctor, who left for the Naval Academy and has been on the football team all four years, as his Navy football bio indicates.

He was the last in a line of outstanding Big Bear quarterbacks playing up there at 7,000 feet in the San Bernardino Mountains.

I distinctly remember covering the 2006 CIF title game, at Big Bear, between the Bears and San Jacinto. A cold, crisp but sunny December day.

Like most of the work I did back then, the items that appeared in print are not available online, which is an amazing concept. But I am no longer surprised that that is the case.

However, the second half of this blog post from back in the day makes mention of Big Bear and Proctor winning the 2006 CIF title (when he was a junior) … and in this Los Angeles Times piece, the author does a good job of rounding up Proctor’s athletic achievements.

So, the Navy-Air Force game. Air Force appears to have more speed and more athletes, and went ahead 28-10 in the fourth quarter, which seemed like the end of Navy, which passes badly, if at all. But Proctor led them on three scoring drives, the last completed with 19 seconds to play which, with a two-point conversion, tied the game at 28-28.

It goes to overtime. Navy got the ball first and Proctor scored on a keeper. But … a tick after the touchdown, there’s a yellow flag in the air, and Proctor has been flagged for unsportsmanlike conduct. On his way off the field he appeared to indulge in a bit of taunting, which seemed unlike him, but there was the replay, and he shouldn’t have been in the defensive guy’s face, and queue the “dum-dee-dum-dum” impending-doom music.

Navy’s kicker lined up for a 35-yard extra point, and perhaps in trying to get a little more distance on his kick he hit it low, and one of Air Force’s taller guys got a hand on it, and it’s 34-28 sted 35-28. Air Force scores in four plays, kicks the PAT, and Navy loses 35-34.

Here is the Associated Press version of the game story.

Normally, Proctor would have come out of that game as a hero, the little guy who seemed to will Navy to come back from 18 down in the fourth quarter, who ran for 134 yards and three touchdowns and passed for 132 yards and another touchdown. But the penalty in overtime, along with the CBS color analyst 1) recalling how Washington lost to BYU by a point when Jake Locker was flagged for celebration on a touchdown and the long PAT failed and 2) noting that the Navy PAT was long and, thus, low and it turns out blocked and 3) the replay of Proctor saying “hello” to an Air Force defender, prompting the penalty (a harsh but defensible call) … and we’re still talking about Proctor.

This lengthy recap of the game by one of Navy’s broadcasters quotes Proctor as saying:

“I got up and I was trying to run to our sideline. Some guy got in my way and I just told him to move explicitly and he called it. It’s unfortunate that the refs made a call like that, but it’s football.  That’s the way it is.  If we make that PAT, we wouldn’t be talking about it.”

The author gently chides Proctor in the story, suggesting that “discretion” is critical during a game, and Proctor was not discrete in chatting up an Air Force defender while in view of the official.

If he stays healthy, Proctor presumably will get a chance to help Navy win another big rivalry game, versus Army. A victory there might make the end of the Air Force game easier to forget. And if I’m lucky, maybe I will blunder into that game in the middle of a night, too.