Regardless of their age, most Tiger football fans would have little trouble picking their favorite all-time Farmington team.
For the younger set it might be Mark Froehling's 2005 Missota Conference champions who came within a touchdown of playing in the state tournament in their first year in Class 5A post-season play.
For a slightly older crowd there was the string of Earl Wetzel-coached Tri-Metro Conference powerhouses of the 1980's and early 1990's, including the 1992 team that lost to Detroit Lakes in the Prep Bowl.
Immediately prior to Wetzel's run were the Chuck Hansen years that produced a 1976 Missota Conference co-championship and a 1978 team that battled state power Apple Valley to the final game of the season in quest of the then rare playoff berth.
And most anyone who knows anything about the history of Farmington football is aware of the unbeaten 1969 team that went through the opposition like General Sherman through Atlanta. There were no playoffs in that era, but the St. Paul Pioneer Press crowned Farmington its "mythical" state champion.
All of the aforementioned teams, as well as many others, have left their imprint on the Tiger football tradition, but based on the numbers, the most successful of all may have been the team from 1917.
A look through weathered editions of the Dakota County Tribune told the tale of a team that scored at least 423 points in winning seven straight games.
Ironically, the school board opted to back out of its scheduled opener with Faribault because Farmington hadn't fared very well in recent years and it felt that Faribault might be too much to handle for the home town lads.
Instead the locals opened with St. Paul Park. The final score was not given because the reporter didn't want to embarrass the opposition but he did offer the winning team "...scored three points per minute and the length of the game was 54 minutes..." For the mathematically challenged, that would be 162 points.
The reporter went on to say, however, that the next opponent, the "fast, prison-town boys" from Stillwater, would provide a stiffer challenge in a game to be played as part of the Dakota County Fair.
Again, the final count was omitted from the game story. The fact that Farmington won by a margin of 102 points was not.
From there the locals played merely dominant football, shutting out Hudson, Wisconsin (55-0), Northfield (38-0) and Hastings (26-0) and scoring pedestrian over Owatonna (19-13) and New Prague (13-7).
Add up the totals and the 1917 team scored at least 423 points and gave up somewhere in the neighborhood of 20.
That's a record that will probably last awhile.
