This is my first foray into fake news. Let me explain.

Like many cheerleading squads across the country, the Owatonna High School football cheerleading squad has adopted the practice of some of the squad members doing pushups every time the team scores. The number of pushups depends on the team’s total score after each score. If the team’s score is seven, they do seven pushups, if it’s 14, they do 14 pushups and so on.

The Owatonna football team’s opening game of the season was a big rivalry game with our archrivals from Faribault. Faribault beat Owatonna last year so the Owatonna boys definitely had revenge on their minds. By the end of the first quarter it became apparent that this year’s bragging rights would belong to Owatonna as the score stood 27-0 Owatonna.

This also meant that by the end of the first quarter the Owatonna cheerleaders had done 67 pushups. And Owatonna just kept on scoring. The final score was 61-0. According to my math, that means the Owatonna cheerleaders had done 307 pushups by the end of the game.

Now it is true that as the score get bigger the cheerleaders did start to struggle a bit. Some of them had to take a little break here and there. And they were not doing full military pushups. But this was the first game of the season so close to 307 pushups during the two-plus hours it took to play the game is still pretty impressive.

It occurred to me, and this is where the fake news comes in, that if the Owatonna football team keeps scoring at such a furious pace all season and the cheerleaders keep up their pushup routine, by the end of the season the cheerleaders might be strong enough to defeat some of the football players in arm wrestling. And that would be quite the headline.

But despite the many pushups done by the Owatonna cheerleaders, there may have been some cheerleaders who did even more. Over the weekend a college team in central Minnesota defeated its opponent 98-0!