POLAND — Poland’s football seniors have spent so much time knocking on the door, they might feel like they’ve been part of a four-year bottle drive or vacuum cleaner sale.

You couldn’t get much closer to the postseason than the Knights did in 2012 and 2013, while still knowing for the entire final week of practice that you would be handing in the pads and jerseys the following Monday.

“It came down to one play,” quarterback and defensive back Adam Mocciola said.

He was speaking of an early October home game against Spruce Mountain his junior year. The Knights had the Phoenix on the ropes before Spruce’s explosive offense used a successful two-minute drill to steal a 23-20 victory.

Spruce Mountain advanced to the Class C West championship game. Poland, despite bookend shutouts of Lake Region and Gray-New Gloucester to begin and end the season, didn’t make the quarterfinal cut.

Having that rug pulled out from underneath their feet was a familiar refrain to the Knights, who were a two-point conversion away from stopping Winslow and denied by Dirigo’s fourth-quarter drive the previous year.

Lo and behold, those teams wound up in the regional final, while Poland again sandwiched two wins around a deceiving six-game losing skid.

Easy to guess what is the primary order of business for the Knights’ upperclassmen: Finish the job, in every sense of the phrase.

“We’ve been close the past two years,” slot receiver and defensive back Nick Cote said. “The senior class has been playing football together since fifth grade. This is our last year, so we’re giving it all we’ve got.”

Poland is a school that has bucked the trend of athletes specializing in a sport. Many choose to compete in a different activity every season.

Thanks to their recent success in other games, the Knights have reason to believe that experience will help hoist them over the top, as well. Boys’ basketball made an unforgettable run to the Class B West championship this past winter. Baseball was ranked No. 1 in the region for most of the spring.

“We did have a really dedicated core group of guys that played multiple sports and really committed themselves to the weight room,” coach Ted Tibbetts said. “We taped one of our practices and watched a little bit of it. It’s still early, and there’s a lot of technical things we can fix, but they’re fixable. You can’t fix speed and strength in a week. That takes a couple years to build.”

Or in the case of seniors Mocciola, Cote, all-conference lineman Tony Benedict, slot receiver Will Bernier and fullback Robbie Porter, eight years.

They are the first group that has followed Poland’s youth program all the way from its official formation to the end of their careers.

“We’ve lost a few along the way, but most of us stuck together,” Mocciola said. “We’re pretty strong.”

Changes in enrollment and in the way the Maine Principals’ Association classified the teams have complicated Poland’s efforts to carve out a football identity over the years.

The Knights began in Class B, competing against mighty Mountain Valley, Wells, York and Cape Elizabeth.

They retreated to Class C in Tibbetts’ first season, producing the first .500 record in school history and — see the trend developing? — winning the final game on the schedule before missing the postseason by a quirk of the Crabtree points.

After that two-year cycle, the MPA reintroduced a fourth enrollment class for the first time since the 1980s. Poland remained in Class C but found itself playing Mountain Valley, Wells and York again, along with powerful Leavitt and Spruce Mountain.

“We had new quarterbacks (in 2013). That was a big shift, because Tony Whalen had been a staple for as long as he’d been in high school,” Tibbetts said. “I think that was a bigger challenge than the new league.”

A year older and wiser, Mocciola and Patrick Jacques guided the Knights to first place in their summer 7-on-7 league. That fulfilled the first goal.

The next one: Finish in the top half of the conference.

“We look fast, and stronger than we’ve ever been,” Tibbetts said.

Perhaps even strong enough to kick down that door.

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