The four members of Schreiber High School’s 4×800 boys track team were feeling pretty good on Feb. 16.

Terry McGinty, Kevin Taylor, Maxwell Meehan and Colin Funk, all seniors, had just completed a strong race at the state qualifying meet and had earned a time that would send them to the New York championships a few weeks later.

As they rested and recovered five minutes later, one of them got a text from a friend.

“It said that the [results] website said we had been disqualified,” McGinty recalled. “And we were so confused because no one said anything to us at any time.”

Unbeknownst to the Schreiber runners and coaches, a violation had occurred during the race.  One of the Schreiber athletes had drifted out of his assigned lane sooner than he was allowed to, and so their successful qualifying time was erased.

All of a sudden, their dreams of winning a state title in a career marked by so much interruption was gone.

“It was a shock, and really, really frustrating,” Taylor said. “We trained all season for states, and then in a few minutes it was all gone.”

But vindication is the fuel that fires so many athletes. The desire to right a wrong, or prove that a result or performance in the recent past was not a true representation of what they can do, often results in spectacular performances.

And that’s what happened 23 days after the disappointment for the Schreiber quartet.

Competing at the Nike Nationals on Staten Island, on the same track they would’ve run on at the state championships, the Schreiber team defeated all comers from around the nation, grabbing first place, and All-American status, with a time of 7:57.08.

This qualifies the Schreiber boys for the Nike outdoor nationals in Oregon on June 16 and made them feel quite a bit better about the state disappointment.

“We knew we could go fast and we knew we could turn around how we felt by not making states,” Funk said. “And we were really happy afterwards but we also knew our time [at Nationals] would’ve probably been good enough to win states.”

The foursome from Schreiber in Port Washington has only been running together as a group this year, and coach Arnold Donato said their chemistry was obvious from the start. The fact that all four boys are seniors and had gone through adversity before made it easier, he said, to get them to bounce back and refocus after the disappointment in qualifying.

“I spoke to them immediately afterwards and we talked about refocusing; we had another meet 48 hours later,” Donato said. “I knew there were other things ahead of us they could focus on.”

Those other things turned out to be a blistering race at Nike Nationals.

“It was in the back of my mind that we could win it, but the fact that all of us did our PR [personal record] that day was so great,” Meehan said. “And we know we still have states in the spring to focus on. One last chance.”