Hudson, where a high school won 72 games in a row

For 22 years, the longest winning streak in American high school football belonged to a town of barely 2,500 people out on the western edge of Lenawee County. Between the second week of the 1968 season and the 1975 state final, the Hudson Tigers won 72 straight games. They did not just win — they buried people, outscoring opponents by something like 33 to 5 on average and shutting out 35 of them along the way.

The number 72 mattered because of what it passed. The old national record was 71, set by a school in Jefferson City, Missouri. Hudson, coached by Tom Saylor, went one better and held the crown until 1997 — a generation in which no high school anywhere in the country could match what a farm town in southern Michigan had done. It is still the Michigan record, and it sits among the longest streaks in the sport’s history.

The streak finally ended in the Class C championship game against Ishpeming, a town from the Upper Peninsula that happened to own its own gaudy winning streak at the time — two of the winningest programs in the country, settling it on the same field. The 1968–75 Hudson teams went straight into the Michigan Sports Hall of Fame in 1976.

Hudson is an easy town to drive past — the kind of tidy brick main street the Michigan Southern Railroad helped raise in the 1840s, settled even earlier under the plain name Bean Creek. But on a Friday night in autumn, the bleachers fill, and somebody almost always brings up the streak. Three years without a loss has a way of sticking to a place.