POLSON — Win a state championship and you get a parade.

Or, if you’re the Whitefish Bulldogs and you snap a 36-year dry spell, you get to ride on a fire truck in the parade, and you get to be grand marshals of the annual Winter Carnival and you get to be featured on a full-page cover of the Whitefish Pilot and you become, truly, the toast of your hometown.

You’ll never pay for a drink in Whitefish again — once you get to drinking age, of course.

But win a state championship in Polson, a city that’s never had a football team ride fire trucks holding a championship plaque and hasn’t even been to a state title game since 1969, and you’ll get all that and more. Heck, they might even fudge that minimum drinking age, at least for one night.

The 2016 Polson Pirates don’t have to look far for a path to their own football fame. Like their Northwest A conference rival Bulldogs of a year ago, Polson has its own experienced senior class, its own coach’s son in a starring role, its own pair of Division I recruits and, the Pirates hope, the same destiny awaiting.

Tanner Wilson is the third-year starting quarterback for the Pirates and a kid who carries himself with the poise and maturity of the son of not only a head football coach but also a high school principal. He has a (somewhat) full brown beard covering his face and speaks in complete, well-articulated sentences.

It’s hard to find anyone to say a bad word about him.

“He’s my best friend so I better talk good about him,” his teammate Matthew Rensvold quipped.

Senior leaders Wilson and Rensvold, Polson’s first two University of Montana football commits since Tanner’s dad, Scott, became the Pirates’ head coach 16 years ago, have formed a unique bond on and off the field that’s helped lead Polson to a 2-0 start entering Friday’s showdown at perennial powerhouse Dillon.

“I don’t know if inseparable is the right word,” Scott Wilson, the head football coach and first-year principal at Polson High School, said. “But they both have the same interests. They do a lot of things together.

“I think that they almost are like brothers. It’s that tight of a relationship and I think that will continue in years to come.”

Wilson and Rensvold have been spending time together on and off the field since they were four years old, when Wilson’s family moved to Polson and the two sons of football — Rensvold’s father, David, coaches the offensive and defensive lines for the Pirates — were water boys, ball boys and a constant presence at Polson practices and games.

On first glance, Rensvold is the one that looks like the superstar athlete. He’s tall and strong, listed at 6-foot-4 and 210 pounds, and his hands are the size of those made for catching footballs. He committed first to the Griz, doing so in early July, while his teammate and best friend continued to search for scholarship offers either as a quarterback or safety.

“When I committed he didn’t have an offer yet but he was going to go down to camp at the end of July,” Rensvold said. “The coaches wanted to see him play and then they threw him an offer, like, the next day and he’s like ‘yeah, I’m going to take it so we can play together.’ It’s pretty cool.”

It was a pretty cool moment for Wilson, too.

“That was really exciting,” he said of receiving the scholarship offer. “We always talked about we wanted to go to the same college and play together just so that we could always have our friendship and stuff. He had committed earlier and then once I got that offer it was pretty set in stone. I know that’s what I wanted to do.”

The Pirates won just three games last season and haven’t won a playoff game since before any of the senior class was in high school, so expecting a state championship reads like a pipe dream on paper.

But Polson overcame a handful of season-ending injuries a year ago to qualify for the postseason and lost a nail-biter in the first round, 9-6 to Columbia Falls.

With state champion Whitefish replacing nearly its entire lineup, the Pirates and Wildcats are expected to be evenly matched again this year and, likely, with a conference title on the line.

Columbia Falls has blown out its first three opponents and looks like a state title contender, but Polson’s first two wins are nothing to sneeze at either. The Pirates beat Hamilton 24-10 to open the season and hammered Corvallis 47-14 a week ago. Two of Columbia Falls’ three wins are against the same two opponents, and by a nearly identical margin.

Most of the Pirates won’t talk about a state championship yet, but they will talk about the opportunities that exist if Polson can find balance offensively — something they’ve done with a resurgent run game in the first two weeks — and avoid serious injuries.

“I know that (this team) has a lot of potential, that they could be up there with a lot of the teams that we’ve had,” Scott Wilson said. “Our biggest thing is that we don’t have a lot of depth and so we have to stay healthy if we want to achieve any of our goals.”

“We have great potential,” Tanner Wilson added. “It’s going to be about how hard we work and if we stay healthy. I think we can do great things this year. I’m hoping we can make it to the playoffs and then that will take care of itself.”

Rensvold, with a bit of prodding, was able to see a little further into the future.

“I think we can win a state championship, I honestly do,” he said. “I believe in our guys and I believe that we can. We’ve never won a championship but we’re hoping to, I can tell you that.”

Polson’s biggest test before its Oct. 14 showdown at home against Columbia Falls will come Friday in Dillon. The Beavers boast their own Division I quarterback, Troy Andersen, a Montana State commit, and have played in the last five state championship games, winning three of them.

Dillon throttled the Pirates 43-7 in Polson a year ago.

“Every year, Dillon week’s always a good week for us because it always shows us where we are,” Rensvold said. “They’re always a high-caliber team. If we go in there and play well, get a win, then it shows that we’re the real deal.”

The Pirates and Beavers will kick off at 7 p.m. Friday in Dillon.