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Less than 24 hours before the kickoff of the 2009 high school football season in Montgomery County, University of Oregon running back LeGarrette Blount floored taunting Boise State University lineman Byron Hout with a right hook to the jaw.

The punch happened moments after the Ducks' 19-8 loss. It was caught live on national television in a game that began, by NCAA mandate, with a midfield handshake between the two teams, not unlike the one that immediately follows every Montgomery County Public Schools contest.

"You do worry about high school kids seeing that stuff, but most of them are smart enough to know better," Quince Orchard head coach Dave Mencarini said.

No similar incidents have occurred in the county this season, and just because it happens on ESPN does not mean it will happen under the Friday night lights. But Blount was in the back of some minds, at least, on Sept. 4.

Whitman's home upset of Northwest that night had some parallels to Boise State's: a dominating performance against a historically superior program. As players lined up for the postgame handshake, which was ultimately without incident, Vikings coaches could be heard exhorting their players, "Don't say a word" and "Keep your mouths shut."

"I think what happened with that kid from Oregon is an isolated incident; you could see he had other issues," Northwood head coach Dennis Harris said. "But we can use that as an example to our players how acting like that brings shame to your school, yourself and your family."

Most of the coaches surveyed for this story said they did not specifically discuss Blount with their players. But they, like Harris, said sportsmanship is a theme they hammer home from the first day of practice.

Nonetheless, isolated incidents do occur. In November 2007, a member of Blake's varsity team in street clothes used a small knife to cut the hands of three Magruder players during the postgame handshake.

Two seasons later, Bengals head coach Tony Nazzaro has turned that negative experience into a positive lesson for his subsequent teams.

"Ever since then, we've been able to use it as a teaching tool," Nazzaro said. "In that case, the person gave no indications beforehand of what he was going to do. But I've had kids who should be held out of the handshake because their emotions are still running too high …

"Those type of incidents are few and far between, so we shouldn't let a couple of bad incidents ruin what is still a positive experience 99 percent of the time."

Harris also said he has held individual players out of line after the game if he or one of his assistants deemed the player too "upset" to handle himself. It has happened with whole teams, as well.

Local rivals Einstein and Kennedy were nearly in that boat Friday. Emotions run high in the rivalry anyway, and the Titans' Mike Bonavia, the winning coach, pulled his team off the field immediately after the handshake.

"We pulled the kids aside and told them, ‘We're Einstein, we know what losing feels like,'" Bonavia said. "‘So we lose with class, but we win with class, too.' … The fact we had to say something at all, we constantly have to babysit kids."

Bonavia recommends that the handshake occur before the game, and that teams go their separate ways afterward. In his words, "It's 0-0, everybody's OK, there are no tempers."

That obviously would not eliminate incidents entirely: There was a pregame, not postgame, handshake in the Oregon-Boise State game. But most coaches seem to agree that the key is keeping players away from one another when emotion could overrule reason.

"If there is an incident, most of the time it's one or two kids and we'll pull them aside," Nazzaro said. "If we were in that situation where we felt both teams were heated, then that is something we would do, take both teams off the field."