CAMBRIDGE – Week 5 of the Illinois 8-Man Football Association season was strange for the Amboy-LaMoille-Ohio team.

After playing its Week 4 game on Saturday, the Clippers turned around and traveled to Cambridge to play Ridgewood on Thursday, Sept. 26.

The other strange part was the Clippers lost, 34-22, to Ridgewood (who had the same turnaround as Amboy) for their first loss since the 8-Man state championship in 2022.

“I told the kids after the game, ‘Don’t let this one game define the rest of our season. We still have everything ahead of us to achieve,” Clippers coach Scott Payne said. “We know what we need to work on now.’ They exploited a couple of things we need to fix and we’re going to fix them this week.

“A loss is only bad if you don’t learn from it. That’s exactly what we’re going to do. We’re going to learn from it and move on.”

Scheduled for four meetings this season and last, Amboy had won the first three.

Being a tried-and-true cliché that it is hard to beat a team three times, let alone four, and the Clippers struggling to get a running game going, they trailed 16-0 after the first quarter and 16-8 at halftime.

“It is difficult to beat a team four times in a row. It was a tough game. They came out and outplayed us. They took it to us,” Payne said. “It’s a tough environment to play down there. They just had a better night than we did.

“We made quite a few mistakes up front throughout the game. We weren’t picking up certain blocking schemes. They had a really good game plan against us. They got us down early and we couldn’t come back from being down 16-0. We had a couple of costly penalties in the second half.

“It’s one of those nights where things didn’t go our way. You’re going to have nights like that.”

While the running game couldn’t get past the trenches, senior quarterback Eddie Jones was asked to throw the ball more, which led to him finishing the Week 5 8-Man West Division game with two touchdowns.

Payne said the entire team understood what a loss means and the wakeup call that should come after.

“A loss like this wakes you up. I wouldn’t say we were on cruise control or anything like that. We had a good week of practice and worked on stuff we needed to work on,” Payne said. “We had a good game plan going in. I don’t know if it was a short week since we played on Thursday night. I don’t know what it was.

“It didn’t matter what we tried to do, it just didn’t go our way. It was bound for something like that to happen to us eventually. It’s a tough loss, but we still have four games left on our schedule.”

The first game, Week 6, is a conference game against Flanagan-Cornell-Woodland.

Payne and the Clippers have watched tape and have scouted the Falcons talent.

A wide receiver who is going to garner the attention of the Clippers top-two defensive backs, Jones and junior Cody Winn, and a quarterback who likes to run and has a good arm as he threw for six touchdowns against West Prairie two weeks ago.

“We watched film of Flanagan-Cornell-Woodland on Friday. I gave them the weekend off. I told them to forget about football for a few days,” Payne said. “We came back Monday and it’s all about the Flanagan game. The kids are excited. I’m pretty sure they’re chomping at the bit to get back on the field Friday night.”