They've shown up with the sniffles. They've worked through sore throats. They've never let a little winter cold or a yearning to avoid a test or fudge a missed homework assignment keep them home.

For at least the past 225 days of school, 16 Medfield Heights Elementary pupils have not skipped a day of class. Yesterday, Ravens fullback Sam Gash treated them and their parents, grandparents and teachers to a football game for their efforts.

"It's a great way for kids to see how important school is," said Katie Becker, who teaches fourth- and fifth-grade math at Medfield Heights. "Just like we do in the work force -- we get paychecks -- the kids see that there are rewards for hard work and that making an effort does pay off."

Gash has been motivating Medfield Heights pupils to come to school for almost a year and a half in an uncommon partnership with the small elementary school in a working class North Baltimore neighborhood, where drug addictions and low-paying jobs have replaced stable employment with such Baltimore industrial staples as London Fog, Noxzema and Stieff Silver.

"I have a wonderful school, a beautiful school, and our test scores are very good," Principal Debbie D. Thomas said. "But my babies weren't coming to school. My thing was, I felt that if we could get our attendance up, we'd see an improvement overall with successes and gains with our boys and girls in academics."

So Thomas took advantage of a family friendship -- her mother is a longtime friend of Gash's mother -- and approached the NFL player from Hendersonville, N.C.

"I said, 'Sam, let me adopt you, let my school adopt you,'" Thomas recalled. "He said, 'OK,' and he's really gotten into it."

He formed the Sam Gash Perfect Attendance Club and visits the school once a month to hang out with children who have not missed a day of school. He has read stories to them. He ate Thanksgiving dinner with them. And in June, on the last day of school, Gash flew back from North Carolina to hand out perfect-attendance T-shirts, pose for pictures and sign footballs, shirts and just about any scrap of paper shoved his way.

When Gash told the principal this month that he wanted to take his club members to a football game, Thomas and her staff combed their attendance records to count the number of children who had not missed a day of school this year.

The results astounded them.

Of Medfield 352 pupils, 256 qualified for Gash's club this year.

"I said, 'Oh, that's too many. We have to narrow this,'" Thomas recalled. "So we counted children who had perfect and prompt attendance last year and this year."

And so 16 classmates and 34 relatives and faculty members sat in the first few rows of the upper deck behind the end zone.

It was the first professional football game for many of them, and they were giddy with excitement. (The purple cotton candy also might have contributed.)

Brittany Jacobs, 5, said she liked "when they throw [the football]."

Her friend, 4-year-old Joseph Laumann III, could barely sit still, decked out in his Ravens sweat pants, jersey, leather jacket and helmet.

And the 10-year-old Profilio cousins, Vanessa and Emily, were so excited about the game that they got to the stadium nearly two hours before the 1 o'clock kickoff.

It didn't seem to matter that promises of meeting players on the field fell through or that Gash saw little playing time in yesterday's 13-12 Ravens win over the Tennessee Titans.

"This is great for the kids," said Tom Profilio, Emily's father and Vanessa's uncle. "Emily has gotten up in the morning saying, 'I have to go to school today. I can't be sick. If I'm sick, I can't go to the Sam Gash club.' Kids will get out of bed for that."