The Maine Principals’ Association and the high school sports establishment preserve the best for last, every year.
Ten winters ago, when the sanctioning body restructured the basketball tournament due to changing needs and moved the Class A showcase from the first two weeks of March to February vacation, hockey took over as the terminus of that bumpy, cold-weather highway.
From that executive decision forward, the second weekend of March evolved into Super Saturday at Androscoggin Bank Colisee. Hockey’s state finals no longer had to compete with anything, save the college basketball on your television or the nip in the air that made you want to lock your door and hide under your blankets.
Not only has it seized the moment and lived up to the name, I would say it exceeds expectations and demands a better label.
Every winter sports season now floods its back pages with the kind of story you can’t help but tell your grandchildren, in part because it defies immediate description.
Saturday’s Class A final was the perfect ending. How it was meant to be. Now, of course Saint Dominic Academy sympathizers will disagree with that assessment based on bottom-line details. The Saints succumbed 2-1 to Scarborough High School on Sean McGovern’s breakaway goal with 17.1 seconds remaining in double overtime.
As the hours, days, months and years burn on, however, the runners-up will recognize clearly as the champions that they were part of something special, something classic, and something unmatched in the state this calendar year.
Hey, most of you know I’m a basketball guy in the winter. It’s nothing personal. I have lousy circulation. I’m partial to warm gymnasiums. And I grew up in a small town where the ice was contained in driveways, not in a rink. Most of you kid me about it. Some of you harass me about it. After 26 years of state finals and hundreds of regular-season battles tucked between, I’ve developed the thick skin worthy to handle it.
All that said, hear me now and don’t be afraid to use it against me: There is no event in Maine high school athletics wielding the potential for pure drama to match the Class A hockey championship. Not one. No way. No how.
It ended well past regulation for the second consecutive year, once again at St. Dom’s expense. McGovern’s goal ended a streak of more than 45 uninterrupted scoreless minutes that had hearts accelerating, stomachs churning, and fingernails gnawed.
No goals after the first-period exchange between the Saints’ Brad Berube and the Storm’s Skylar Pettingill implied the polar opposite of no action. It was a night of nothing but near misses, perilously loose pucks, clean hits, gasps and groans.
There’s just nothing like hockey for the pure adulation and unadulterated heartbreak of sudden-death overtime. When you get to this point in the season with two equally talented and exhausted teams, the odds of that result are pretty good.
How many buzzer-beaters do you actually see in the basketball tournament? One, maybe two. More often than not, it happens in the quarterfinals. By the account of most veteran writers in the state, Cape Elizabeth’s victory at the horn over Medomak Valley in the Class B final last month was only the fourth state-game walkoff in six decades.
We could ask the same question about home runs in the bottom of the seventh inning in baseball state finals, or 99-yard drives to win gridiron’s Gold Ball. I’ve seen a few, but they’re once-in-a-blue-moon deals.
Hockey has this type of drama in its DNA. It also boasts a brotherhood that no other sport can touch. To see that in action, all you had to do was watch despondent St. Dom’s players accept their runner-up medals, then skate over on their own to embrace Scarborough coach Norm Gagne and his players. One at a time, all the way down the line. Yes, Scarborough returned the favor when its turn arrived.
When you’ve bumped and checked each other, and bled with one another, for 60 minutes and change in front of 3,600 bipartisan admirers, you’re in an exclusive club. You get it. You understand each other, and perhaps the game, in a way nobody else in the arena can fathom at that moment.
Scarborough and St. Dom’s are two programs that do it the right way, year-in and year-out, and got it right Saturday.
The people who put on the show got it right, too.
Right arena, right day, right spot on the schedule. An event that deserves to stand alone, forever.
Kalle Oakes is a staff writer. His email is koakes@sunjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @Oaksie72.
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