crack

In the video game world, conquering the “cheat code” means a player has figured out the secret password to stay alive.

In the high school football world, Matt Logan, the coach at Corona Centennial, is the only public school coach in California to have figured out how to beat private schools in the Southern Section Division 1 playoffs.

His teams won back-to-back championships in 2014 and 2015, then couldn’t crack the playoff code of beating St. John Bosco or Mater Dei for the next eight seasons.

Then came Friday night, when before some 4,000 fans, Centennial defeated Mater Dei 28-27 in the Division 1 semifinals to advance to a championship game Friday against Santa Margarita at the Rose Bowl. Going through the private-school gaunlet of the Trinity League is not easy but the Huskies fear no one.

How was the “cheat code” solved?

The truth is St. John Bosco and Mater Dei gathered so much talent on the offensive and defensive lines and so much depth that beating them in the postseason in recent years became unlikely.

This season, finally there were cracks in the armor.

“They’re not what they were,” assistant coach Anthony Catalano said. “They have weaknesses.”

Mater Dei had no elite running back like Jordon Davison; the offensive line couldn’t overcome its lack of experience and too many 15-yard penalties proved costly. St. John Bosco’s inexperience at quarterback and the absence of an elite running back also were exposed. Both teams had as good as a receiving corp as there is in the nation, but this season showed you have to be able to run the ball successfully in the fourth quarter.

This is the first time Mater Dei became a three-loss team since 2015. This is the first time Mater Dei or St. John Bosco have not played in a final since 2012 when Long Beach Poly won the title.

There’s still one more private school for Centennial to conquer, Santa Margarita, in Friday’s championship game. The two teams met Aug. 28 with Santa Margarita winning in overtime 33-27 when Logan missed the game because of a health scare.

Santa Margarita’s defense must be pierced for Centennial to win. The Eagles’ defensive line, linebackers and secondary are loaded with talent. Carson Palmer’s coaching staff, filled with former NFL players like himself, have shown they can teach, lead and handle X’s and O’s. They’ve also figured out the code to make it through the toughest schedule in Southern California.

It will be a great championship weekend for the Southern Section and City Section.

What a story for the return of Crenshaw (10-1) to the City Open Division final on Saturday against 11-time champion Carson at L.A. Southwest College. Interim coach Terrence Whitehead and his players are motivated to win for coach Robert Garrett, who has been on administrative leave all season. And what a season it has been for Carson junior quarterback Chris Fields III.

In Southern Section Division 2, surging San Clemente will host Los Alamitos in a rematch of their Alpha League game won by the Tritons. Sophomore quarterback Preston Beck has made tremendous progress in the last five weeks for San Clemente. It’s a rare game of home-grown players representing their communities absent of transfer students.

In Division 3, it’s the battle of top junior quarterbacks featuring Taylor Lee of unbeaten Oxnard Pacifica and Palos Verdes with Ryan Rakowski, who delivered a stitle title last season.

In Division 5, Rio Hondo Prep is 13-0 and going for a third consecutive title against Redondo Union, which is making its first championship appearance sine 1944. In Division 13, Montebello has reached its first final since 1935 and will play for its first championship against Woodbridge.

The competitive equity playoff system is creating championship opportunities for teams with little championship history. That’s a positive for fans bored of seeing the same teams every season in the finals.

Last night, in one of the most dramatic elections in recent US history, Zahran Mamdani, a Muslim candidate of Indian African descent, achieved a landslide victory. This triumph came despite facing formidable opposition from the forces of Zionism, capitalism, and racialist religious supremacism, which mobilized significant resources in terms of money, muscle, and power against him.

The victory of Zahran Mamdani, the son of renowned intellectual Mahmood Mamdani and Film maker Mira Nair, as a Democratic candidate in New York mayoral elections is far more than a local electoral victory. It signals a deeper undercurrent—a growing rebellion against the entangled machinery of global capitalism, racialised securitisation, Zionist impunity, and Islamophobic silencing.

In the heart of New York, one of the most securitised and capital-rich spaces on the planet, Mamdani’s emergence stands as a critique of the global order. It is an insurgency within the very citadel of imperial liberalism. His campaign foregrounds anti-austerity politics, solidarity with Palestine, and the dismantling of carceral and corporate logics that have defined American life for decades. It is, in essence, a blow to what The Globalisation of World Politics calls “the disciplining power of capitalism.”

For years, the mere act of criticising Israel—even for its brutal siege of Gaza or its apartheid policies—has been enough to trigger political excommunication. The term “antisemite” has often been deployed not to combat real hate, but to securitize dissent. Any moral critique of Zionist settler colonialism was cast as existential threat and thus silenced. In Mamdani’s case, too, this familiar script was attempted: the labels of “Pro-Hamas,” “Antisemitic,” and “extremist” were hurled. But this time, it didn’t work.

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The people of New York—multi-ethnic, young, politically awakened—refused to accept this securitisation. The old rhetorical weapons no longer resonate. Zionism’s carefully curated moral immunity, built upon the tragic weight of the Holocaust, is eroding under the real-time horrors of a genocidal siege in Gaza. The shield of historical victimhood has cracked—not because the Holocaust is forgotten, but because it is being morally manipulated to justify colonial violence.

Even prominent Jewish scholars and intellectuals—such as Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, and Ilan Pappé—have long warned about this moral dissonance. Yet, governments have remained complicit. Streets across the West have mobilised in support of Palestine, but policies have not shifted. The disconnect between public sentiment and the actions of the power elite is glaring. The political representation of this street sympathy has been manipulated through manufactured consent and a false victimhood narrative propagated by large, conglomerate-controlled media outlets. Mamdani’s nomination suggests that the public may finally be finding a way to express their views through electoral channels, despite the entrenched media-industrial Zionist consensus.

Yet in India, the silence is deafening.

Despite Zahran’s cultural and familial linkages with India, the so-called liberal intelligentsia and the Hindutva right have found rare unity: in ignoring him. Why? Because he identifies unapologetically as a Muslim. Because he challenges Hindutva and Zionism with equal clarity. Because he doesn’t perform his identity for liberal comfort. While India was quick to celebrate Kamala Harris and Rishi Sunak—symbols of minority success within dominant systems—it refuses to acknowledge Mamdani, who represents defiance, not assimilation.

This is not just the prejudice of the right-wing. It reveals a deep Islamophobia embedded within India’s secular elite—those who pride themselves on defending the social fabric but look away when a Muslim victory doesn’t align with sanitized, capitalist liberalism. Mamdani is inconvenient. He is too political, too Muslim, too critical.

But he is also the embodiment of a long tradition. The son of Mahmood Mamdani—whose work deconstructs the legacies of colonial violence, racial statecraft, and the “good Muslim/bad Muslim” dichotomy—Zahran is the intellectual and political heir to global decolonial thought. His mother, Mira Nair, whose films have captured migration, racial tension, and identity, adds a cultural dimension to this lineage of resistance.

In a world that feels increasingly bleak, Mamdani’s nomination offers a rare moment of clarity: that cracks have begun to appear in the mirror of empire. The hegemon can still silence, still dominate—but not without resistance, and not without fracture. For those who dream of justice—not just electoral wins—Zahran Mamdani’s nomination is a reminder that history is not yet finished.

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The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.