Martha's Vineyard needed a touchdown. Twenty-six seconds left on the clock. Archrival Nantucket up 26-21. First and goal, seven yards to reach the promised land of the Nantucket end zone. Vineyard quarterback Alec Tattersall walked toward the stands of Dan McCarthy Memorial Field, raising his arms over his head — get on your feet, Vineyard, on your feet. His teammates followed suit, arms lifted, encouraging, and the once-quiet crowd roared back to life.

In 1988, head football coach Donald Herman had just started coaching at Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School and was unfamiliar with the Island Cup, the annual rivalry football game between the Vineyard and Nantucket. The game was scheduled to be played on Nantucket that year, so he went over to “the other island” early with the junior varsity team, meeting up with the Nantucket coach.

In 1991, Jason O’Donnell was on Coach Donald Herman’s first state championship football team at the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School.

On Monday, Mr. O’Donnell is out on the field with the four other varsity assistant coaches alongside Coach Herman, helping the team prepare for the Island Cup this weekend.

Success doesn’t materialize out of the thin air, and in the case of this year’s varsity football team, now 6-4 as they head into the Island Cup, the groundwork was laid four years ago, when the current seniors took their first starts for the junior varsity squad.

“We’re building the foundation,” junior varsity head coach Mike Magaraci said in a Gazette interview. “And then junior and senior year, you build the house.”

When Charles McGrath wrote about the annual Island Cup game between the Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket football teams for the New Yorker in 1984, he likened it to a fierce sibling rivalry. What mainland team could hope to drum up a rivalry as poignant with either of the Island squads? For all that the Vineyarders can’t stand about the Whalers, they also know that the only football team in the entire country that could possibly understand what it means to be an Islander is that of their brother-in-isolation, Nantucket.

The varsity football team defeated the Nantucket Whalers 10-7 Saturday afternoon, ensuring that the Island Cup’s visit to Nantucket would be nothing more than a day trip. A large crowd gathered on Saturday night at the Steamship Authority to greet the returning victors, who hoisted the trophy above their heads.

The Island’s oldest and youngest high school football teams met, not for a match but for a meal last Friday night at the school cafeteria. Nineteen members of the 1960 team met the 2010 team before the big Saturday game with Nantucket. Add to that six members of the 1960 cheerleaders, who also shared stories with the current squad.

On Saturday, after two years of frustration and delay, Nantucket finally came back across the Muskeget Channel and down the placard-lined mean streets of Oak Bluffs to rekindle a rivalry that, simply by geography, is unlike any other in sports. It was worth the wait.

The scouting reports are in and Whaler Pride is back. The last Nantucket team the Vineyard faced finished the season 0-10, capped by an embarrassing 43-22 Island Cup thrashing that saw Vineyard coach Don Herman pull most of his starters by halftime.

By JIM HICKEY

Vineyard football fans can dust off their cowbells and Harpoon the Whalers signs, because the Island Cup game is back.

After a brief one-year hiatus, the fabled football game between the Vineyard and Nantucket will return this year, scheduled to be played on the Vineyard the Saturday before Thanksgiving. School and athletic officials from both Islands have been busy in recent weeks hammering out an agreement to bring back the game, which was canceled last season for the first time in nearly 50 years.