In motion on the first snap of the game, Dominic Baez took the handoff and sprinted through the secondary for an 80-yard touchdown.

The star running back accounted for 201 combined yards and a total of 3 touchdowns in St. Thomas Academy‘s 36-14 win over Apple Valley on Thursday at Rosemount High School. But he insisted the praise should go to his teammates, especially on his long touchdown run.

“I got out there, and I see [wide receiver] Manny Sims making one of the best touchdown blocks I’ve ever seen,” Baez said. “I look behind me, I see [offensive lineman] Andrew Nelson box a guy out and slow him down. That was all them.”

The Cadets, ranked No. 1 in Class 5A, stalled out offensively for much of the first half after Baez’s long run, until they inserted Ethan Ruiz at quarterback for their final drive of the first half. St Thomas Academy (5-0) proceeded to mount a 10-play, 78-yard drive to end the half. Ruiz connected with Sims for a 26-yard completion on the drive before Baez, who had seven carries for  36 yards on the drive, punched the ball in at the goal line for a 2-yard touchdown.

St. Thomas head coach Travis Walch said all elements of Baez’s game stand out.

“His balance, his vision, he can catch the ball,” Walch said. “We had him punting tonight because our kicker (Toren Plitingsrud) is our best soccer player, and he was at a soccer game tonight.”

The score gave St. Thomas a 15-0 lead with 15 seconds to play before halftime.

Baez gashed the Eagles’ defense for 139 yards on 16 carries in the first half alone. In what was a one-sided ballgame, St. Thomas outgained Apple Valley 198 to 94 over the first 24 minutes of play.

After back-to-back three-and-outs to open the second half, Apple Valley (2-3) methodically moved down the field to dent the scoreboard for the first time. An 11-play, 94-yard drive that was capped off with a 30-yard touchdown pass from senior
quarterback Q Barnslater to junior wide receiver Tyson Johnson to cut the Eagles’ deficit to 15-7.

But St. Thomas Academy responded on its ensuing possession with a quick five-play, 69-yard scoring drive. The Cadets went back to junior quarterback Tristan Karl under center in the second half, who finished off the possession by finding Grant English in the endzone for an 18-yard touchdown to extend the lead back to 15 points.

Apple Valley head coach Pete Usset said penalties plagued the Eagles in the second half, including a late hit that extended the Cadets’ third touchdown drive.

“It takes a full team effort to beat those guys,” Usset said. “And part of that team effort is being disciplined.”

St. Thomas’ offense motored on in the final quarter, scoring on the opening play of the frame. Baez, in motion on the snap, took the handoff then turned around and threw it back to Karl, who caught the ball in space and scored. Baez’s third total  touchdown gave St. Thomas a 29-7 lead, which put the game out of reach.

Senior defensive back Matthew Wagner put the exclamation point on the victory with an interception on a deep pass from Barnslater on the next possession.

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In an alternate timeline of Minnesota sports history, the NHL’s North Stars might have moved from Bloomington to downtown Minneapolis and shared Target Center with the NBA’s Timberwolves. Instead, Minnesota’s first pro hockey team moved to Texas in 1993, and became Thursday night’s foe – the Dallas Stars – for the Minnesota Wild’s preseason home opener.

And with discussion about the venues for NBA and NHL teams in the Twin Cities heating up again, 30-plus years later, the Wild’s owner made it clear that discussion of a shared facility for the hockey and basketball teams is a non-starter.

“We are gonna stay in St. Paul, and they’re gonna stay in Minneapolis,” said Wild owner Craig Leipold, talking to reporters in his Grand Casino Arena suite between periods on Thursday. “It’s pretty hard to negotiate from that point.”

The Wild have a decade remaining on their lease at Grand Casino Arena, which opened with the Wild the franchise’s arrival in Minnesota.

With the crowd still buzzing from two Marco Rossi goals just 10 seconds apart late in the first period, Leipold offered a bit of a buzzkill immediately, making it clear that he was not going to answer questions about the status of standout forward Kirill Kaprizov. There has been silence from both the team and from the player regarding Kaprizov’s future in Minnesota after the Russian star reportedly rejected the team’s initial contract extension offer of six years and $128 million.

“I really am serious. There’s nothing to gain, everything to lose,” Leipold said when pressed about Kaprizov’s situation. “I’m not touching this.”

With general manager Bill Guerin standing behind him, the owner reiterated that he has put things in the hands of his front office.

“I have a lot of patience. Billy’s the guy,” Leipold said. “He’s the one that does the negotiating no matter who it is. That’s his responsibility, his role. I think we’ve got a great relationship.”

When a reporter compared Kaprizov to former star forward Marian Gaborik, Leipold pushed back. Gaborik, heading into the final year of his contract in Minnesota, was injured early in the 2008-09 campaign, and the Wild were unable to trade or re-sign him. Gaborik eventually signed a free agent contract with the New York Rangers, with the Wild getting nothing in return.

“The Gaborik situation was a disappointing situation, but this is entirely different,” Leipold said.

On a day that began with the Wild unveiling a throwback jersey to commemorate their 25th year since joining the NHL as an expansion team in 2000, Leipold talked at length about the team’s arena, reiterating the need to update the rink to bring it more in line with the modern amenities offered at newer venues like Target Field (opened in 2010) and U.S. Bank Stadium (opened in 2016) in Minneapolis.

After their request for more than $700 million in state funding was barely considered at the State Capitol during the 2025 legislative session, Leipold talked of support from St. Paul mayor Melvin Carter and county government officials who are “listening” as the team prepares to ask the state for around $100 million in 2026.

“In order to survive in the NHL, you not only have to be in a market, a great market, which we are in,” he said. “We need to be in a really good building that gives us the opportunity and the chance to take advantage of all of the revenue streams that our competitors have in the NHL.”

Leipold was the first owner of the NHL’s expansion Nashville Predators in 1997, and sold that team to purchase the Wild from original owner Bob Naegele Jr. in 2008. He noted that despite the Wild not making it past the first round of the playoffs for more than a decade, season ticket renewals were at a 93 percent rate over the summer. And he admitted that getting past round one is very, very important both fiscally and psychologically, for the franchise and its fans.

“A second round run is really important. A third round run is outstanding,” he said. Asked about a “fourth round run,” which would mean a Minnesota team in the Stanley Cup Final for the first time since 1991, Leipold looked flushed.

“I can’t even let my mind go there yet,” he said.

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Legendary auteur Paul Thomas Anderson has made the film of the year with the incendiary, incisive and frequently quite funny “One Battle After Another,” which just happens to be a searing indictment of this particular moment in American history. Inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel “Vineland” (this is his second Pynchon adaptation, after 2014’s “Inherent Vice”), Anderson transplants the novel’s Reagan-era revolutionary story to present day, loosely utilizing the general narrative and themes, but making it entirely his own. It is a film that is both chillingly prescient and deeply present in this contemporary milieu.

“One Battle After Another” feels like it could be about today, tomorrow or yesterday in America’s timeline, rooted not necessarily in real events but events that feel like they could, or should, be real.

The film opens in an immigration detention camp, as a band of left-wing political militants known as the French 75 infiltrate the facility to liberate the detained, and detain the military overseers. Enchanting rebel leader Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) locates Col. Stephen Lockjaw (Sean Penn) and relishes sexually humiliating him, something that he also relishes. It’s a dynamic of pleasure and violence that locks the pair into a long-standing exchange of sexual power that will ultimately lead to the dissolution of the French 75, and years of persecution for its members.

Perfidia’s partner is Pat (Leonardo DiCaprio), aka the Rocket Man, the French 75 explosives guy. She becomes pregnant, and when the baby is born, she beats a hasty retreat from motherhood, having chosen the right father for her child. You can’t say Pat wasn’t warned, as Perfidia’s mother tells him, “she’s a runner and you’re a stump.” No man could match her fiery and footloose energy.

Her story, a whirling dervish of montage, makes up the first act of the film, in which she runs risky operations while romancing her respective political paramours, betrays her comrades and disappears into thin air, leaving Pat and her baby girl to retreat into witness protection in the Northern California sanctuary city of Baktan Cross. Her daughter, renamed Willa (Chase Infiniti), grows into normal teenager who trains in martial arts and wants to hang out with her friends, chafing against the paranoia of her single father, now going by Bob, who won’t allow her to have a cellphone, and passes his time smoking weed in their remote cabin.

Bob’s is not garden-variety parental paranoia, though, because Lockjaw returns, and the French 75 have to knock the rust off their revolutionary skills in order to protect Willa from the maws of state-sanctioned violence that Lockjaw has mobilized in order to pluck the baby bird from her nest. Bob might be a washed-up old stoner, but he earned his stripes for a reason, and he will stop at nothing to save his daughter.

“One Battle After Another” is a tale of epic scope about the many shadowy networks and secretive factions that undergird our society while hiding in plain sight. He introduces not just the French 75, but an underground railroad for Latino immigrants run by Sensei Sergio (Benicio del Toro), a powerful white supremacist secret society, a racist backwoods militia, a convent of cannabis-cultivating nuns, all pulling the strings behind the scenes of American life. But Anderson balances the sprawling, conspiracy-minded aspects of this yarn with the intimate father-daughter story, which is the heart of the matter.

He reflects that blend of epic and intimate in the film’s style, working with cinematographer Michael Bauman. The film was shot on glorious VistaVision, a higher-resolution, widescreen variant of 35mm film, imbued with a thrillingly kinetic sense of movement — the camera follows closely behind our characters as they move swiftly through space, and sweeps over stunning vistas of burning cities and monumental land masses. A climatic car chase is hypnotically rendered, lulling, trancelike before a stunning finale. Even the aerial shots have the jiggle and quiver of a helicopter, not a drone. That something so enormously scaled is clearly handcrafted is deeply moving.

Jonny Greenwood’s score moves between soaring strings and dissonant piano keys, alternately soothing and anxious; a few pieces composed by Jon Brion add an ambient layer of wistfulness.

At the center of it all is DiCaprio as a bumbling dad, clad in an old robe and Solar Shields, and the performance he delivers is a harrowing, harried hoot, playing the hysterical foil to del Toro’s smooth sensei. The two men have different styles but the same goal: to keep their families intact.

“One Battle After Another” isn’t just an explosive revolutionary text but a story of fatherhood — the values we pass down to the next generation, and how we care for them, with love and generosity; with fear, anxiety, a little bit of hope, and above all, a whole lot of faith.

‘One Battle After Another’

4 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for pervasive language, violence, sexual content, and drug use)

Running time: 2:42

How to watch: In theaters on Friday, Sept. 26

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Snapchat videos led to the discovery of a group of Florida men who authorities say illegally captured, at least 14 alligators, skinning and killing many of them, with one man telling investigators he shot one animal with a Glock and made dinner with some of the meat.

Other videos found in the investigation show five dead alligators on the deck of an airboat, and two of the men standing over them, pistols in their hands, according to a just-released report from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

Jacob William Latreille, 21, of Mims, and several others illegally captured seven alligators on April 19, some by hand, snatching them from the front of a moving airboat, before killing most of them, FWC announced this week.

The agency said members of the group illegally took and killed at least seven more alligators between April 24 and May 11.

Latreille was arrested Monday on 13 charges of the illegal killing, possessing, or capturing of American alligators, his arrest warrant shows. The warrant lists the charges as 3rd-degree felonies. The FWC says arrest warrants have also been issued for three men from Titusville who will face similar charges: Luke David Michael Landry, 25; Robert Gage Martin, 28; and Wyatt Scott Lowe, 24.

Florida rules say alligators can only be hunted, captured or killed by people who have purchased a license, permit and tags from the state, a $272 package that allows the harvesting of two alligators annually. The use of firearms is prohibited, and hunting is only allowed during certain times in August through October. All slain alligators must be immediately tagged. The possession of any alligator hide not tagged is prohibited, according to FWC regulations.

The investigation began after the FWC received a complaint May 22 about Snapchat videos showing Landry “skinning out” an alligator in his garage, with two other dead alligators also visible.

FWC agents then searched Landry’s home and seized knives from his garage which later tested positive for alligator DNA.

When they later searched Landry’s phone, agents found video taken April 24 showing Landry, Lowe and Latreille killing at least one alligator, while videos taken April 28 and April 29 show Landry, Martin and Latreille killing five alligators on an airboat on the St. Johns River, the report shows.

There are also videos from later dates showing Landry and Martin skinning, processing and preparing alligator hides and skulls. Another video shows Landry’s son carrying a live alligator through the front yard of their residence. Landry later said he killed that alligator, according to the report.

Landry admitted to going out on Latreille’s airboat to catch and kill alligators, including one he said he shot with his Glock. He also admitted to skinning three or four of them in his garage with Martin. He said he “‘made dinner’ with some of the meat,” the report says.

In a second interview with FWC agents in July, Landry said some of the alligator hides and meat were placed in his freezer and an unidentified man picked them up. He also said some of the meat was “split up between the individuals involved” and a large quantity of the meat was eaten over a couple of days, the report said.

Brevard deputies had previously found a dump site with alligator carcasses. Landry said he and Lowe dumped alligator carcasses there, according to the report.

FWC agents spoke to Latreille on June 30. He said he and others killed alligators on multiple nights using his green airboat. He admitted to killing one with his father’s Glock, according to the report. The airboat was seized as evidence, the report shows.

When Latreille’s phone was searched, agents found videos recordings taken April 19 showing three other people on his airboat snatching alligators from the water.

The phone also contained videos taken April 29 showing Latreille, Landry, Martin and a woman on the airboat. That video shows off the dead animals on the deck and Latreille and Landry with their guns.