It was a tough night to be a Bulldog as the Riverside Brookfield football team hosted Metamora in its season opener on Saturday.

How bad was it? Well, the Bulldogs lost 60-14 and a Metamora fan even won the split-the-pot raffle at Shuey Stadium in Brookfield.

Metamora exploded for six touchdowns in the final 7:52 of the first quarter and took a stunning 40-0 lead after just one quarter.

Metamora, from the Peoria area, returned many of the key players from last year’s team that finished 12-1 and lost to eventual Class 5A State champion Springfield Sacred Heart-Griffin in the state semifinals. The Redbirds began this season ranked fifth in the preseason class 5A poll.

RB coach Otto Zeman knew that Metamora would be, by far, the best his team would face all season. After the game, Zeman was just relieved that his team was intact.

“We’re alive and we’ll be back,” said Zeman. “We played hard the whole time. We never quit.”

Pete Szumski stopped Metamora’s opening drive when he recovered a Metamora fumble at the RB 32-yard line. The Bulldogs came out firing on offense with Zeman’s patented fiv- receiver shotgun set. Quarterback Lucas Hackel (17-for-40, 184 yards, TD, 3 INT) was hot at the start, completing his first two passes for a first down.

A roughing the passer penalty moved RB to the Metamora 41, but then things started falling apart. A bad snap over Hackel’s head resulted in a 27-yard loss. And then Metamora’s Scott Peterson blocked Hackel’s punt to give Metamora the ball at the RB 26.

Metamora scored in three plays with quarterback Caleb TerBush scoring on a 7-yard run.

Terbush soon struck again with a 49-yard touchdown pass to Chad Kamm to make the score 14-0.

A Hackel interception on the next series led to another quick Redbird touchdown and the rout was on. Metamora (1-0) added two second quarter touchdowns to take a 54-0 halftime lead.

The second half was played with a running clock, but RB managed to score twice. One bright spot for RB was the play of VandeMerkt who was making his varsity debut. The 160-pound sophomore showed that he can catch as well as throw. In the third quarter, VandeMerkt (5 passes, 69 yards) caught a 29-yard touchdown pass from Hackel. Playing quarterback in the fourth quarter, VandeMerkt threw a 17-yard touchdown pass to Walker with 7.6 seconds left in the game.

The Bulldogs will try and regroup when they host Nazareth on Friday at 7 p.m.