​LANCASTER — It was a tale of two halves for the Lancaster football team in their season opener against visiting Hilliard Darby.The Golden Gales were impressive in the first half, especially on defense, shutting out the Panthers to take a 9-0 halftime lead. However, the Gales’ inability to move the ball with consistency in the second half proved to be their downfall. As a result, Lancaster’s defense was on the floor more than it should have been, and Darby took advantage.The Panthers rattled off 20 unanswered points in the second half. The Gales kept fighting and scored with 3:40 remaining to cut the margin to a one-score game, but it wasn’t enough as the Panthers hung on for a 20-15 nonconference victory on Friday, Aug. 21, at Fulton Field.More: Starving for success, Lancaster set to usher in the McKinney eraLancaster certainly played well enough to win, and it was one of those games where they had to feel like they let slip away. The glaring stat was that Darby ran 59 offensive plays compared to just 41 for the Gales. “We didn’t execute when we needed to execute,” Lancaster coach Jeremy McKinney said. “We were punting the ball when we should have been picking up first downs. How you win games like that is you maintain offensive possessions. You don’t give them the ball back because they eat the clock. I thought we had a good game plan defensively, and I thought our defense played well. We started missing tackles and got sloppy in the second half and hurt us, but at the end of the day, we have to execute our stuff on offense.”After getting a stop on defense to open the game, the Gales responded with a 10-play drive capped by a Gunnar Bell 28-yard field goal with 4:07 left in the first quarter.On Darby’s next offensive possession, they faked a punt on fourth down but were denied by the Gales’ defense to give Lancaster the ball at the 50-yard line. Six plays later, Jahmeir Gordon scored on a dazzling 12-yard touchdown run. He spun off a defender at the line of scrimmage and scampered into the end zone to give Lancaster a 9-0 lead with 8:42 left in the first half.Lancaster’s defense came up huge late in the first half after Darby drove to the Gales’ 26-yard line. Sophomore Landon Burke intercepted a pass to kill the drive.In the second half, with Lancaster’s offense struggling to move the ball, Darby scored on its first two offensive possessions on a pair of short-yard touchdown runs, the last coming with 11:55 remaining, giving them a 14-9 lead. On their third offensive possession of the second half, Lancaster’s defense got a huge stop on fourth-and-one, but the Gales’ offense went three-and-out.Darby then pushed the lead to 20-9 after the Panthers scored on a 63-yard touchdown run with 5:47 left. The Gales’ offense came alive and was sparked by a 28-yard pass completion from quarterback Brody Broeckel to Gordon. Broeckel scored on the next play from three yards out to cut the margin to 20-15 with 3:40 remaining