Green Hope's football team can look forward to three things this week - starting classes, getting their new helmet decals and not having to hear any more about "the streak."

The Falcons ended the state's longest-active losing skid Friday night against Smithfield-Selma.

The reversal of fortune couldn't have been clearer on the scoreboard: a 38-0 win stopped a 0-38 streak.

And so this week, coach Kwame Dixon and his staff will be slapping a school logo on the side of his team's helmets. It was part of a deal with Dixon, who is now 1-0 in his first year with the Falcons, and his squad. Players were going to wear plain green helmets until they won their first game.

The logo itself will have changed from previous seasons. It's one of several efforts Dixon has made to get Green Hope to forget about its past.

"We're moving forward, we're not looking back," Dixon said.

If the 0-38 streak, which dated back to 2007, did not end this year, the senior class of 2012 would have graduated without witnessing a single varsity win in four years. The previous three graduating classes could only claim to having seen one, two and five wins, respectively, with a 5-61 record over six seasons.

All of that means little to this year's team, which has bought into Dixon's plan for the program.

"Coach Dixon's mindset (when) he came in here was to put everything in the past and focus on the now," said senior Marcus Williams, who ran for one touchdown Friday. "That's what we did and the outcome showed (it)."

Dixon, who was hired in February, said the first signs that his team was ready to take its next step forward came during the summer.

"The biggest turnaround in our program was with the (team) camp. When we went to camp, we left as one team and we came back as a completely different team," Dixon said. "I didn't know if that was going to translate into wins, but I knew that we had gotten better from the time we had started. ... I knew we were going to be able to compete, but competing and winning are two different things."

For the players who hadn't done much of either during the past three seasons, Friday's game got the proverbial monkey off the back.

This year's Falcons have switched from a triple-option offense to a spread formation.

Sometimes quarterback Will Nassif took snaps from the shotgun formation. In others, he took them from the "pistol" formation, where the quarterback stands between the running back and the center to receive the snap.

On Green Hope's first play under Dixon, Nassif took a shotgun snap with four wide receivers split out and one running back in the backfield. Nassif found Eddie Auslander for a 21-yard gain, and the rest of the night featured much of the same.

Nassif was creative with the new offense and was unafraid to take off on quarterback draws - he ran for 96 yards on 12 carries. The offensive line gave him plenty of time to hit open receivers as well, and he completed 13-of-15 passes for 180 yards.

"People are giving me some credit, but I didn't make one tackle, I didn't throw one pass," Dixon said. "The kids came out ready to play."

The rest of the Falcons' schedule looks manageable.

After this week's game against Cap-8 Conference power Leesville Road, Green Hope will play four straight opponents coming off losing seasons (Sanderson, Athens Drive, Holly Springs and Apex).

That also means that the Falcons must end their season against five straight opponents who finished with winning seasons a year ago.

But after leaving three straight winless seasons in the past, the team is ready to see what lies ahead.