MOOSEHEART, Oct. 24 - With his team sitting 5-4 after the regular season, Mooseheart football coach Gary Urwiler was aware his team was going to draw one of the IHSA Class 1A heavyweights.
 
As it happened, the Ramblers got Goliath.
 
Mooseheart has been bracketed with Dakota, the top-ranked team in the Class 1A polling conducted this season. The Indians are 9-0 and the top seed in their portion of the bracket.
 
"You're not going to get anything nice when you're 5-4," Urwiler said. "Even if we had finished 6-3, we might have gotten a middle-seeded team. It is what it is, and it's a chance to play another team and you never know what might happen."
 
Kickoff is set for 1 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 31, at the Dakota High School field, which is 10 miles northeast of Freeport, some 101 miles northwest of the Mooseheart campus.
 
This year's playoff appearance is Mooseheart's eighth overall and its fifth in Urwiler's 10 seasons as head coach. Overall, the Ramblers are 1-7 in playoff games and all those games have taken place in the Class 1A brackets. Mooseheart's last playoff appearance came in 2007, when the Ramblers lost 36-6 at Milledgeville.
 
"If you put it into the perspective of the last four years, we've been in the playoffs three times," Urwiler said. "That doesn't happen a lot. Seventy-five percent in the last four years is not a bad thing."
 
The Ramblers finished the regular season with a 5-4 record and 40 points in the IHSA's playoff system which factors a team's wins and wins by opponents. Mooseheart undoubtedly benefited from its first-year participation in the new Northeastern Athletic Conference.
 
"The level of play in the conference has been outstanding," Urwiler said. "When you thinking of Class 1A football and the strong conferences that exist down south, it's nice to think that we've put together a competitive football conference in our area of the state."
 
At mid-season, Mooseheart was 5-1 and had just defeated Alden-Hebron for the first time on the field since 1996. Since then, however, the Ramblers have three straight losses.
 
"It's easy to look at the last three weeks and go 'hmm'" Urwiler said. But the overall picture and the totality of it is that maybe we're building something here."
 
Dakota won the Class 2A title in 2007 and also in 2005. Overall, the Indians have been to the playoffs 16 times and this year marks their 12th straight season in the postseason. Coach Jerry Lano has guided Dakota's program since 1989.
 
As strong as the Indians program is, Urwiler said the early focus will be on halting the things that have contrived to create the Ramblers recent losses.
 
"Obviously our biggest challenge is going to be to figure out what's been going on in the last three weeks," Urwiler said. "We have another week to fix it. You don't want to try to fix it against a team like Dakota. But it's an opportunity. We've done what we needed to and we've earned our chance."