WINTHROP — The next time the Winthrop/Monmouth Ramblers play a football game that counts, their little brothers’ and sisters’ Halloween candy will be half gone, and their parents will be less than a week away from electing a new President of the United States.
That’s why, with winless Maranacook serving as the foe, the Ramblers wanted to turn Friday night’s regular-season finale at Maxwell Field into a dress rehearsal for the Class D South playoffs.
Winthrop/Monmouth’s starters turned it into a very short rehearsal, getting a little less than one half of action and scoring all six times they had the ball en route to a 54-6 win.
With the win, the Ramblers finished the regular season 7-0 and clinched the Campbell Conference Class D championship.
“It’s big. Campbell Conference champions, that’s something nobody can ever take away from us,” senior running back/linebacker Alec Brown said. “But at the same time, we all know there’s still a lot more to do.”
Winthrop/Monmouth has a bye next week while the rest of the conference wraps up the regular season, then will sit out the regional quarterfinals the following week, having earned another bye as the top seed in a playoff format that had to be revamped after Boothbay dropped out of varsity competition in preseason.
The Ramblers won’t just be sitting back and observing the next two weeks. A scrimmage could help fill the downtime, and they still have plenty to work on, head coach Dave St. Hilaire said.
“We might do something (with another team), but we could actually go intrasquad and have a pretty good battle,” he said. “We’ve got to do something for game-type conditioning because obviously we got a quarter tonight with the first group. We’ve got to get some conditioning in the next few weeks.”
Winthrop/Monmouth didn’t even get the benefit of driving the field for any of its seven first-half touchdowns, as each drive started on the Maranacook side of the field.
“We came into this knowing we had to take it like a regular game and execute,” senior QB Matt Ingram said. “Just because they weren’t the best doesn’t mean that we have the chance to take a break.”
Brown scored the first two touchdowns, from 26 and nine yards out. The next two touchdowns came on the first play of their respective drives — a Nate Scott 45-yard run and, after a Tyler Cote interception, a 25-yard run by Andrew Pazdziorko.
Ingram and Avery Amero connected on a 12-yard touchdown pass and Cote scored on a seven-yard run to wrap up the starters’ duties midway through the second quarter.
Kane Gould’s 12-yard TD run and Cameron Gaghan’s 23-yard fumble recovery return for a touchdown capped the Ramblers’ scoring.
Connor Firth spoiled the shutout bid with a 68-yard touchdown run for Maranacook (0-7) in the fourth quarter.’
With teams such as three-time defending state champion Oak Hill, Lisbon and Dirigo favored to join the Ramblers in the second round of the playoffs, St. Hilaire said his team should have an idea of what to expect when it returns to host its next game.
“We’ve got to be able to stop power football,” St. Hilaire said. “We know it’s coming. The teams to beat out there, a lot of them run power football. We’ve been pretty good with it in spots but we need to be more consistent with it.”
“We’re going to clean up the little things and keep on improving, building off of this week, and try to stay active and not get rusty,” Brown said.
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