Carleton Ravens win Panda Game on 55-yard Hail Mary: 'I don't think anyone at Carleton is going to forget it any time soon'

Jesse Mills launched the ball; Nate Behar made the catch that will probably launch about 100,000 views over the next couple days.

Rarely does Canadian university football become a trending topic any time before the playoffs. Rarer, still, is the combination of the finish and the circumstances in the nation's capital on Saturday. The Carleton Ravens completed a 55-yard Hail Mary touchdown with no time left to beat Ottawa 33-31 in the Panda Game on Saturday on a near-impossible dream of the play, with Behar grabbing a tipped ball and taking it into the end zone for the win. That set off a raucous celebration, with hundreds of Carleton students leaping over the barricades to storm the field.

The end zone camera also shows that Ottawa cornerback Randy Williams nearly batted the ball down to the turf. There's your agony of defeat right there.

To put it in perspective, Carleton went 14 years without football from the time the original Ravens folded in March 1999 to when it restored the team before the 2013 season. There are few words to capture what it must mean to go from having no team on campus to, in two short years, besting a rival with such a combo of skill and luck.

"How about a 65-yard toss that got tipped and we go in the end zone," Ravens coach Steve Sumarah said. "Sometimes those things happen. You never know. That's why you play to the end."

That capped a school-record 13-catch, 276-yard, three-touchdown day for Behar, who was a cornerstone of Carleton coach Steve Sumarah's first recruiting class before the 2013 season.

Ottawa was inside Carleton's 20-yard line with fewer than two minutes to play and a slim 28-27 lead. Quarterback Derek Wendel, though, committed a time-count violation on second down and eight, which under Canadian rules calls for a loss of the down. Ottawa, as a result, not only kicked a field goal to go ahead by four points, but lost a chance to burn off a precious 20-25 seconds. After a Carleton turnover and a Gee-Gees punt, Carleton got the ball back at its own five-yard line with exactly 25 seconds to play.

And then, after starting quarterback Nick Gorgichuk completed two passes to reach midfield, this happened.

It was Mills' only snap of the afternoon, as Carleton put in the stronger-armed of its two quarterbacks for the all-or-nothing heave. Gorgichuk, in his first Ontario University Athletics start, played efficiently, completing 23-of-34 passes for 318 yards and two touchdowns with no interceptions. He also rushed for a 16-yard touchdown on Carleton's first scrimmage play. But numbers don't really tell you what it was like.

"It was perfect how we ran it," Gorgichuk said of the Hail Mary. "Nate came underneath and got it. Normally in practice it lands incomplete or goes over the receivers' heads. That's just one of those plays that's going to happen once in a lifetime.

"I don't think anyone at Carleton is going to forget it any time soon."

(Videos courtesy TD Place and Ottawa Sports and Entertainment Group.)

Neate Sager is a writer for Yahoo! Canada Sports. Follow him on Twitter @neatebuzzthenet.