MONUMENT >> The last time Broomfield football made the trip down to Don Breese Stadium for the Class 4A state playoffs, the Eagles left battered, bruised and defeated by Palmer Ridge.

On Friday night under the same bright lights, a year later, the fifth-seeded Eagles played heartbreaker in their 32-23 win over the No. 4 Bears, this time securing their own ticket to the semifinals despite a late-game scare.

Nothing comes easy at this stage of the game, but Eagles senior running back Colin Torres sure knows how to make it look simple. With the score tightening midway through the fourth quarter, Torres ran the Palmer Ridge defense ragged with a 5 1/2-minute series of runs — mostly from himself — before punching in the winning, 20-yard score with just over two minutes left to play.

He finished his night with 168 yards and three touchdowns. “My nerves were running high, but I knew I could count on my big boys,” Torres said. “They paved the way for me, just found a crease, and it felt great. I just found that hole, scored, and celebrated with my boys. No words can explain that, man. We’ve been working all year for this team, all year. We had a bad taste in our mouth since last year, 300-something days, bad taste. This is the team we wanted.”

His fellow leader, senior CT Worley, carried the celebration straight into the postgame interview as he triumphantly lifted his team’s hero. The Eagles will now move onto the semifinals to face off with No. 1 Dakota Ridge, who ended No. 8 Ponderosa’s run with a 14-0 decision on Friday night. Quarterback Darien Jackson helped keep the Bears guessing all night, adding 198 yards and a passing score of his own.

The Eagles hit paydirt in their first offensive play of the game, as Torres shifted into high gear to run the ball 44 yards and past the pylon. Palmer Ridge’s Jackson Mabe responded with his own touchdown to give the Bears a 7-6 lead with 4:30 left in the first quarter, but that advantage for his team was fleeting.

Points after touchdowns were the Eagles’ biggest Achilles’ heel through the first half. They failed to score the extra points on all three of their touchdowns, with Torres (1-yard run) and a Jackson to Gio Toledo connection (16 yards) accounting for their other two six-pointers through the first 24 minutes. They held an 18-10 lead at the half thanks to a 37-yard field goal from PRHS’ Rhett Armstrong.

Mabe picked up his second touchdown of the game to start the third quarter and inch the Bears closer to the Eagles, 18-16, only to see Elliot Less punch them back in the mouth with his own 20-yard sprint to make it a 25-16 advantage in the final minute of the frame.

Mabe continued his menacing mission with another score at the 7:22 mark, forcing Broomfield’s offense to make every yard matter. Torres was just the man for the job. The Eagles stretched out a possession of 5:20 of game time before the man of the hour burst out for his own 20-yard dagger at the 2:03 mark.

Broomfield’s defense took care of the rest. Just two years after their last state championship — and their second year under head coach Robert O’Brien — the Eagles are still on the hunt for another. “The biggest change has been the effort level at practice and the leadership,” O’Brien said. “Our guys want to be great. They want to be great, and they work really, really hard to do it, and that’s been the biggest change. Not that our team last year didn’t, but it’s a different level this year.

“I think you saw it in the fourth quarter, that no one even blinked, when they scored that to come back to two. Our team didn’t freak out. We didn’t panic. We didn’t lose our minds. To be honest with you, our sideline didn’t even blink. … We had a lot of answers for what they were trying to give us.”