Friday night lights burned in Bernalillo on Nov. 3, as the host Spartans were about to close out their 2006 season.

Playoff hopes still lingered, but undefeated Class 4A power Los Alamos was the visitor.

The Hilltoppers were seeing red, but it didn't mean stop, nor did it mean slow down. The red was being worn by the Spartans: red jerseys, red pants, red helmets.

It had already been quite a season for the Spartans, winless in nine games in 2005, during which they said hello and goodbye to their fifth coach in seven seasons. Football takes a back seat to hoops here; the school discontinued football in 1988, resuming it in 1998 at the JV level and then with a varsity team in 1999.

Enter Ken Noel in 2006, and voila, winning - in spite of a move up to Class 4A - became a regular occurrence. "Be the hammer, not the nail," is what he told his Spartans week after week.

"This is Spartan country," reads a sign on a nearby school wall, and the smell of burgers is in the air at kickoff, as smoke from a Burger King to the east wafts over the field. And, just as the smell can't be missed, neither can the sounds of semi trucks and fast-moving automobiles on I-25 to the east, on US 550 to the south.

Bernalillo football isn't unlike the gridiron scene down the road in Rio Rancho; the band may be smaller, but the musicians love strutting their moves on the field at halftime, and the jock rock cued up on a CD player in the pressbox fuels the frenzy of the Spartans' devoted fans. Of course, there are interludes in which the 32-member band gets to play: "Barbara Ann," the old Beach Boys hit, is knocked out in the first half.

What a great finish there would have been if Noel had been able to reverse that 0-9 record of a year ago and turn it into a 9-0 mark.

No, he wasn't a miracle worker. In fact, the visiting Hilltoppers gave no hope to the Spartans at all, scoring on all seven of their first-half possessions to take a 49-0 lead into the locker room at halftime, then later climb aboard their bus after the mercy-rule second half and a 63-0 victory.

The Spartans, playing in District 2-4A, knew a little about lopsided scores this fall, from a 75-0 victory over Mora in their opener to a 55-8 setback to Capital, plus three games in which they scored 35 or more points: a 35-0 victory over Sandoval County's other high school, Cuba; a 46-28 decision over Crownpoint; a 52-35 rout of Espanola Valley and a 50-42 thriller over Taos, in which running back Eric Lucero (5-10, 180) ran for an incredible 446 yards on 38 carries and scored seven touchdowns. (The son of a former New Mexico Highlands University All-American wrest-ler, Lucero also found time to play soccer this season, too.)

Back down to earth the next week, he failed to surpass 40 rushing yards against the Hilltoppers.

"We had a good year," Noel, a one-time guard on a national championship team at Idaho State, said. "We were thinking we had a chance to beat Los Alamos; that's what you try to preach all week."

He's been around long enough to know there are plenty of ups and downs in the business of coaching. He has coached at Cobre, Reserve, Belen and Los Lunas high schools, and said he'll be content to stay in Bernalillo for a while.

"I looked around and saw good athletes," Noel said. "They have everything you need to build a program. At 6-3, we're just scratching the surface. Next year, we're going to make the playoffs."

The six victories is one more than Spartans teams won the past three seasons combined.

And Noel led the team to its first winning season on the gridiron in the 21st century.

Now, if he sticks around ...