Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Merrillville senior safety Greg Hughes was filled with emotion and understandably so.

Hughes wasn’t alone. For the Pirates, it was a long-awaited moment.

“I’ve been playing for all four years, and I had to experience all of the losses, all of the heartbreaks,” he said. “Last year was my first time crying after a loss in I don’t know how long. I was like, ‘I can’t feel that again. We have to play at Lucas Oil.’

“We’ve been working hard all season, going at it in practice, to conditioning, to weights, to all of it. We’ve just been getting it done to go to state.”

Hughes and the Pirates are headed there after defeating Concord 41-14 in a Class 5A semistate in Merrillville on Friday night.

The 5-foot-11, 180-pound Hughes had a momentum-swingin

See Full Page