LISBON  — An entire football field lay before Mike McNamara as Lisbon lined up to punt from its own 6 yard line. The first-down marker stood 18 yards away.

Lisbon is known for rugby-style punts, where the punter runs to one side or the other before kicking. Coach Dick Mynahan gives his punters the option of tucking the ball under their arm and trying for the first down if they think they can get it. 

Since Winthrop had overloaded the right side of its defense, McNamara figured he would have some room to run on the left side. And he did. Just not enough to get all 18 yards.

“My mind obviously wasn’t in the right spot at that time. That was definitely a bad decision,” he said with a sheepish grin. “I’ve had some people talk to me about that.”

“I was just real happy that the defense stepped up,” he said. “I thanked the defense many times after that, that they came up big and kept them from scoring after that.”

Mynahan said the fake punt caught him off-guard, but the way McNamara reacted to it did not.

“I was a little surprised,” he said. “But you know what? I wasn’t surprised that on the next play, he made a tackle in the backfield.”

A senior linebacker/running back/punter, McNamara is the quintessential Greyhound in many ways. Undersized (5-foot-7, 155 pounds), fast, tough and smart, he leads second-seeded Lisbon into Saturday’s Western Class C football championship against top-ranked Yarmouth.

McNamara leads the Greyhounds in tackles, a product of his uncanny ability to diagnose opposing offenses quickly.

“He reads well. He figures out things,” Mynahan said. “Something we talk about all the time is you play a team and they might run one play out of five different formations, but it’s one play. And as soon as you see it, if you pay attention to it, you can guess a little bit. What Mike does, he guesses, and he guesses right nine out of 10 times.”

McNamara credits the coaching staff with keeping blockers guessing.

“We just use our speed to our advantage, move around a lot, kind of confuse them,” he said. “When we’re standing up at the line, you can hear the guards and the center talking about who’s got who, and then when we’re moving around, it’s obviously going to confuse them.”

 But it takes more than speed and wits to get to, and take down, a ball carrier. A standout wrestler with two individual state titles to his credit, McNamara takes on linemen who outweigh him by more than 100 pounds. More often than not, the beefy behemoths are the ones lying flat on their backs after the confrontation.

 “I think that’s where wrestling comes into it,” Mynahan said. “He’s very comfortable in tight spots. He squeezes through and submarines. He’s just comfortable with a lot of big guys around him where a lot of other people would be uncomfortable.”

McNamara is just as comfortable delivering blocks as shedding them. One of the reasons Lisbon’s running game has still been effective despite the absence of injured leading rusher Tobey Harrington is McNamara is still there to help clear a path.

“Mike for his size is an excellent blocker, and his role has always been to block,” Mynahan said. “Last year, though, we used him in the playoff game and he ran really well for us. He has a nose for the goal-line and he has a nose for getting short yardage or getting yardage where there isn’t much.”

The Greyhounds usually limit McNamara’s carries to keep him fresh for defense, where he can do the most damage. That’s fine with the Lisbon captain. His biggest concern is finishing his career with an elusive gold football.

“This senior class, we’ve always been capable, but we’ve never been able to accomplish what we wanted to accomplish,” McNamara said. “This year, with 13 seniors coming out, we felt like we had a real good chance. When we lost to Yarmouth earlier this year, we tasted that loss and we didn’t want to taste it again.”