A little over a year ago, Milton lost in the D3 state title game to Wakefield. The Wildcats lost a good chunk of those players to graduation.

But Milton reloaded as well as anyone could have hoped, and this season earned a D3 state title over Walpole.

It was a terrific coaching job by Milton’s Steve Dembowski, so we wanted to connect with him on how he was able to do it.

Here is an edited version of that conversation.

Adam Kurkjian: I wanted to ask you, because, I mean, I think at a certain point before the season, you have a good idea of what your team will be. But at what point this season did you know you had a state title contender or winner?

SD: I think it was Week 2.

AK: Who was that?

SD: I thought we were 50-50 to beat Scituate in the first game. They’re obviously a good program, but we played so well defensively and so well on special teams, and the offense got better as the game went along. Week 2, we played Framingham at home. In every phase, we just played so well. It wasn’t just the starters. It was when the backups went in. You saw kids doing what they were coached to do and performing well. By the time we got to Week 3, we beat Holliston, who is a perennial contender. But we got to the point where every week we had new kids making plays. I just felt like at that point, I said to my staff that, we got a group here that is deep enough and versatile enough to make a run at the state championship. They all laughed at me. I felt like if we could build off of that, we could get there.

AK: I feel like when teams hit this point, because you lost so much from the year before. But even when you replace guys other years, you’re usually pretty good. Is this what you imagined the program to be like at a certain point, where you could sort of reload?

SD: I think every coach would like to imagine to that point. We’re not picking the groceries here. I think at Milton, the big thing is you want kids to stay at Milton High. Obviously, we still lose good players that either go to private school or reclassify and leave, which is the case this year. BC High had two or three kids we would have loved to have had. Henry Fallon reclassified at Milton Academy, who would have been a tw0-way player for us this year, and was a really solid player on the 2022 team. But we have enough kids that worked their way through the program. I think we had 26 kids in the senior class. I think two of them were first-year players, but the rest of them had kind of been here and knew what to expect. I think they grabbed the opportunity and ran with it. I said this after the Super Bowl, but I started naming off kids, but there’s probably a dozen kids in the senior class that got their first chance to really get on the field and run with it. They didn’t let us down. Nowhere did we have to bench a senior to play a sophomore. I always feel there’s a lot of value in playing seniors, because they’ve got that three-month time, and then it’s over. So many of our guys did a great job with that.

AK: It feels like now you’ve really established a culture there. What does that word mean to this team, and your program?

SD: It’s a great question. I’m not with them all the time. I don’t teach in the school. Our kids compete. They play multiple sports. They train, and they lift weights, and they run. They do 7-on-7, but that’s not the whole team. They certainly expect to win. We’ve had nine straight winning seasons. So they prepare to win. I think it’s, we have a process and a standard we want to play to. We’ve been fortunate to have enough talent that we can put together competitive teams, and handle graduation at key positions, and rebuild. And, obviously, the league this year was extremely challenging, and we were very competitive there, obviously with our non-conference schedule, too, that we were prepared for everything we saw in the tournament. We were able to handle that.