I remember when Redlands East Valley High School opened, in the fall of 1997. My son was part of the first freshman class.

REV was the second high school in the Redlands Unified School District, and opened about a century later than the first — Redlands High School.

In most areas of endeavor, it didn’t take long for REV to catch up. Football, however, was an exception. After five seasons, REV’s football team was 1-48, with its only victory over a school about one-10th its size.

That is where Kurt Bruich came in, hired as REV’s coach.

At that point in time, he was mostly Dick Bruich’s son. The latter was one of the most prominent sports figures in the history of San Bernardino County as coach of Fontana and Fontana Kaiser. He won 292 games and two large-schools CIF titles in the Southern Section, one of the biggest in the state. He also won two lower-division titles at Kaiser.

He needed more than a decade, but Kurt has nearly caught up with his father. His greatest coaching achievement came tonight in Carson, where the LA Galaxy play, when his REV team defeated Concord Clayton Charter 34-33 in the CIF State Division II title game.

First state title in any sport for REV. First state football title for any school from San Bernardino County. Completing a 15-1 season after winning a sixth consecutive Citrus Belt League championship. (Really? They let high school kids play 16 games in a season now?)

This L.A. Times story has video with it. That’s REV in the red.

Beforehand, one of the regional newspapers talked about the comparisons between Dick and Kurt Bruich, which is a natural approach for a father and son duo.

A couple of thoughts on this:

–The notion that Kurt caught or surpassed his father as a coach because he won a state title is a bit fanciful. First, California state title games didn’t appear until 2006. Dick Bruich, now 67, was out of coaching after 2008.

Rule of thumb in high school football is that it’s hard to declare yourself the best when you win a championship in a lower division. REV just won the Division II state title. Dick Bruich’s Fontana won two top-division CIF-Southern Section titles with 14-0 records. I think that’s a bigger deal. Plus, the 1987 title team was named national champion by one media organization. Kurt Bruich has won 105 games, but his dad won 292. Let’s give this another 10-15 years and see where it goes.

–Second, as coaches, father and son may share many core values and fundamental approaches to blocking and tackling, but the style of teams they coach are utterly different.

Dick Bruich coached teams that beat up the opposition. Physically intimidating teams that ran the ball down your throat, took few chances and often won low-scoring and quickly played games. Tonight, he saw his son go for it on fourth down seven times, making it six times. Dick would have punted and let his defense give him back the ball.

Kurt Bruich is the modern breed, with receivers all over the field and lots of passes and a quarterback who threw 40 touchdown passes and only 10 interceptions. He also coaches a team that gave up 30 or more points in every game in the playoffs, and allowed a Clayton Charter kid to run for 323 yards. I am convinced that, even still, Dick Bruich cringes at some of the formations and plays from his son and his staff … and Kurt probably cringes when he watches film of when he was a receiver for his father’s teams, in the mid-1980s and thinks he is looking at football pre-history.

Dick Bruich, a man whose teams I saw play maybe 50-75 times in three decades, certainly will tell everyone his son has surpassed him, and mean it. But not yet, he hasn’t. We always want to call the latest the best; it rarely is.

Two of my children graduated from REV, and one made sure I knew about the REV victory. So did several other people who knew me in a previous life.

It is a big deal. A very big deal. But not the biggest deal in San Bernardino County – or Bruich family — football history.