SAUGUS – Don’t let the final score fool you. Matt Durgin and the St. Mary’s football team walked out of Stackpole Field Saturday with their heads high and their spirits bright.It didn’t matter that they’d lost, 28-8, to a very good Saugus team. As Durgin said, “You don’t always measure success by the wins and losses.”Consider that a week earlier, St. Mary’s had been embarrassed, not only on the scoreboard but on the stat sheet, by crosstown Lynn Classical. Saturday, the score might have been a bit one-sided, but the game itself looked a bit more even.”They’re a good football team, and they came to play,” said Saugus coach Mike Broderick. “They gave us a real good game.””I thought we showed a lot of improvement over last week,” said Durgin. “We moved the ball, made some plays ? and we fought back.”That last part is significant. Saugus sliced through the Spartans like butter in the first two series. Mike Dean, following up last week’s player-of-the-week performance with a 143-yard effort, ran right down the field on the first drive, with senior quarterback Bred Reid plunging in from a yard out for the first touchdown and a 7-0 lead. The next time Saugus touched the ball, Dean ran 69 yards, practically untouched, to the end zone to give the Sachems a 14-0 lead.So it looked as if it would be a repeat of last week, when Classical kept coming. But this time, St. Mary’s stiffened. The Spartans kept the ball for 16 plays and marched it from their own 30 to the Saugus 25 before they finally stalled – something Broderick attributed as much to them as he did his own team’s shift in focus.”We lost a little momentum, I guess,” he said. “But that could be because of them, too. They were playing well.”But,” he said, “We have some seniors on our team this year ? first time, really, that we’ve had a core of them ? and they got our focus back in a hurry. It’s a good group.”Saugus also has some backs ? other than Dean and Reid. One of them, sophomore Shamir Guillaume, was the feature back on Saugus’ first drive of the third quarter, as the Sachems rolled down the field for 61 yards in 12 plays, with Guillaume taking it in from six yards out for the score.After St. Mary’s couldn’t get anything going on its next possession (coming up short on a fourth-and-three from midfield), Saugus got it back and moved the ball freely again. Reid, who had 75 yards on the ground and didn’t throw a single pass all day, snuck through the left side from the Spartan 21, saw a seam going the other way, and burst through it down the far side of the field for Saugus’ final score of the day.”That was a great read,” Broderick said.However, St. Mary’s didn’t leave Stackpole without something to show for it. The Spartans put together a good drive from their own 33 going 10 plays before Jordan Harvey punched it in from the six. Tim Ray caught the conversion pass from quarterback John LaMothe.