Four area youth football teams have made the championship games in their age divisions in the Shoreline Youth Football Conference.
In other words, local squads will be appearing in all but one of the five division finals that will play Saturday at the Surf Club in Madison.
Cheshire Junior Football has two in the running: the fifth-grade squad and the seventh-grade unit.
The sixth-grade team from the Wallingford Vikings is back in the final after winning it all last year as fifth-graders.
Ditto for the eighth-grade team from Southington Knights Travel Football. That team is going for its third crown in five years.
Every area finalist save for the Cheshire fifth-graders is undefeated.
Those fifth-graders are hardly slouches. They stand at 9-1 after playoff wins over Branford (39-6) and Glastonbury (19-0). They’ll take on Guilford in the finals.
Cheshire’s seventh-grade team, a perfect 10-0 heading into its final with Madison, has yet to surrender a point in the postseason. The squad shutout Bristol and Southington by matching scores of 30-0.
Those Southington seventh-graders will have one more year to go the distance in the Shoreline Conference. For now, the Southington spotlight is commandeered by the eighth-grade squad.
Actually, these Knights have held it for awhile. They haven’t lost a regular-season game since the opener of their fourth-grade year.
This season, the squad went 8-0, then thumped Bristol 31-0 in the quarterfinals and Newtown 36-8 in the semis.
The Southington offense has been balanced. Seven different players have scored three or more touchdowns. Defensively, Southington has allowed just 53 points, including special teams.
Wallingford’s sixth-grade team also went 8-0 in the regular season, carried a No. 1 seed in the postseason and delivered on it with a 32-0 shutout of Pomperaug in the quarterfinals and a 41-12 rout of Glastonbury in the semis.
A strong, athletic line coupled with strong skill players has allowed Wallingford to expand its run-based offense to include a passing dimension. Like Southington, Wallingford is able to spread the ball around.
The defense has been lights out at all three levels and a viable kicking game — PATs and even field goals are fairly routine — lends extra sauce to special teams.
Madison awaits Wallingford in Saturday’s finals.
The Shoreline Youth Football Conference spans 16 towns. Along with the three local communities, there’s Branford, Clinton, East Haven, Guilford and Madison on the immediate shoreline and Bristol, Glastonbury, Monroe, Newington, Newtown, North Haven, Pomperaug, Shelton and Torrington inland.