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That team's legacy was honored last Saturday, where during halftime at the Hall-Middletown game, former members of that team, now middle aged, came back and stood on the field as the crowd cheered.
"When I got to Hall four years later, you guys were already storied," state Sen. Jonathan Harris, D-West Hartford, said at the ceremony. "I want to thank the team for taking their dreams - our dreams - and turning them into perfection."
Players attributed the success of the team to its deep roster, the training teammates got town football boys leagues such as the Pony Packers and the Bears, and their coach Frank "Robby" Robinson, who, walking with a cane, stood on the field with them on Saturday.
"He expected you to do well, and therefore you expected yourself to do well," said McGowan, who recalled visiting Robinson's Rhode Island vacation home with the team's two other captains, where they received a captain's handbook he said read like a marine corps manual: Stand up. Be disciplined. Be ambitious.
The team was blessed with great athletes, defensive end John Condon said, and a perfect offense for running a triple option - which made for a good opponent for the team's defense.
"For defense, for us to practice on them, we were the only ones who knew how to stop it," said Condon, now an underwriter for Lincoln Financial living in Concord, N.H.
The offense was so potent it was often held back in games - Robinson, a gentleman, would choose not to run up the score. When the team could have easily racked up 75 points rather than 45, their points-per-game average and the best in the state, Robinson instead chose to send in his second-string players.
But with each successive win that season, the pressure was on to keep winning.
"When you are undefeated, the tension builds and builds and builds," said Brian Palm, now a blues musician living in Ireland who says he could not shake a love of the crowd that was born from playing football.
"As the season went on, there was more at stake," he added.
The Hall-Conard game - the last and biggest game of the season, where the most was at stake - was not one of those games where Robinson took it easy on the other team. A muddy field almost nullified Hall's fast game and wishbone attack, and the Warriors initially struggled, with the Chieftains at one point in the game taking the lead.
Before the game, the team had huddled in the auxiliary gym, and, with the lights off, they took a few moments of quiet time in a pre-game ritual. Then they went around the room, each saying what the game, and what the season, had meant to them. There wasn't a dry eye in the room, former tight end John Lohneiss of Hiddenite, N.C., recalled.
That game was Marty Moran's favorite moment of the season.
"I was scared that we could be upset," said Moran, who used to throw up before games out of nervousness.
But the team refused to stain their perfect record with a loss to their arch rival. Bob Lohneiss, the twin brother of John Lohneiss, intercepted 10 passes and scored two touchdowns that day, and both Kevin Vitale and Billy Burns scores touchdowns in the last quarter. The Hall gridders ultimately pulled through, landing a decisive 45-23 victory over the Chieftains.
"In the end, we hung in there," said Moran, a development officer for a Catholic high school in Rockland County, N.Y., and whose son now plays football for Allegheny College. "That 'we did it' feeling - that was beautiful."
For members of the '75 team, the experience of playing football for Hall, and that magical season, has stuck with them for life.
Palm, whose long blonde hair that spilled out from his helmet earned him comparisons to Dallas Cowboys wide receiver Golden Richards, the football field remains the only place where "life is fair and true."
McGowan recalled visiting former teammate in 1992. When he arrived, the former teammate's wife, whom he was meeting for the first time, greeted him enthusiastically at the door and said that every third day, her husband's high school football days were the only thing he would talk about.
"The only thing I thought was, 'Thank God I'm not the only one,'" McGowan said.
