The game was tied 35-35 at the end of the third quarter, but an apparent two-point lead was taken away from the third-ranked Clippers (15-6) when Bailey Darling’s floater was negated by a charge called against him.
Another charge call against Yarmouth in the fourth proved to be more damaging. Aleksander Medenica was called for the offensive foul and it wiped out a layup that would have cut the Clippers’ deficit to two.
That was Medenica’s fourth foul, and the fifth came just seconds later when he was trying to defend Lake Region’s Jack Lesure in the lane.
Medenica was forced to the bench for good after leading Yarmouth with 15 points and pulling in a game-high 11 rebounds. Lesure then made a pair of free throws as part of an eight-point output in the fourth, and the Lakers pulled away from there.
“The first thing we did is Jack went to go post him up and I’m yelling ‘get the ball to him in the post,’ and let’s see if we can go at him,” Lake Region (19-2) coach John Mayo said of attacking Medenica. “That was a big step in the game for us. Kind of put a little fire in us and relaxed us a little bit.”
Yarmouth coach Adam Smith agreed on the sequence’s importance.
“There’s a few trips that caused momentum to swing, to change, and the pendulum swung for them and not for us,” Smith said. “We couldn’t get it back.”
The pendulum moved back and forth, but ever so slightly, through the first 24 minutes. Lake Region went up by five to start, and led by two after one quarter. Yarmouth led by as much as seven in the second quarter and held a 22-21 lead at halftime.
The Clippers’ last lead came late in the third, then the Lakers tied it on a 3-pointer from Brandon Palmer. That came before Darling’s negated go-ahead basket.
“I thought we played really great game through three quarters,” Smith said. “It really was a well-played fourth quarter by them.”
The Lakers made just two baskets in the fourth, but hit on 13 of their 17 free-throw attempts. Mayo chalked that up to his team practicing foul shots at 6:45 every morning. Free-throw shooting, as well as rebounding and defense, were the areas that the first-year coach wanted to shore up for a Lake Region team that lost in last year’s regional final.
The Lakers displayed all three in winning the region this year. They out-rebounded Yarmouth 34-22 and held the Clippers to 31-percent shooting.
“Our guys have been here before,” Mayo said. “They’re a pretty relentless group. Close games, we seem to come out on the better side of it.”
Nate Smith scored a game-high 17 points, with 10 coming in the third quarter when Lesure was held to a single point. Lesure added 14 and was given the Pierre Harnois Award, which is given to the Class B South boys’ tournament’s most outstanding player-sportsman.
“He’s our leader. He makes us go. He’s the guy that they all feed off of him,” Mayo said of Lesure. “How Jack goes, we go a lot of times.”
Lake Region will face North champion and No. 3 seed Ellsworth in the Class B state championship next Friday at Cross Insurance Center in Bangor.
wkramlich@sunjournal.com
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