AUGUSTA – The score wasn’t perfect, and neither were the runners’ performances, but Lisbon still managed to win its first big trophy of the season on Saturday, running away with the Mountain Valley Conference boys’ cross country title by 40 points over Winthrop and 47 over Wiscasset.

“I’m not sure that anyone on the team even heard the gun go off right away,” said senior Dan Suthers, who finished third overall on Saturday behind Tyler Jasud of Mountain Valley and teammate Jared Cloutier. “Last year, I won this race individually, and I took it out pretty conservative. Even though we had a slow start, I think we all made up ground in the middle of the race. That’s where I made it up, anyway.”

After missing the gun, Lisbon’s Tyler Clark bolted to the front of the field, admittedly “running too fast” to make up the time he thought he may have lost.

“It was pretty slippery and there are quite a few hills here,” said Clark. “I wasn’t ready at the start and sprinted to get back to the front, and that threw off the race a little bit.”

Cloutier was one runner that remained constant for the Greyhounds, getting caught in the middle of the pack to start, but he found his way to the front by the first mile marker and never looked back.

“It’s all a mental race for me anyway,” said Cloutier. “I started to feel like I needed to take off a bit before my coach and I decided I should, so I did.”

Course conditions on Saturday made some runners think twice about turning on the jets, especially on some of the steep downhill sections now covered with wet, fallen leaves.

“The course was soft today,” said Lisbon coach Hank Fuller. “Anyone with a time under 17 minutes would have been really cooking today. That would have been outstanding.”

As it turned out, Cloutier won the race with a time of 17:12, while Jasud followed in 17:22. Suthers (17:25), Clark (17:49) and Seth Mihalik of Wiscasset (18:01) rounded out the top five in the boys’ race.

For Winthrop, the second-place finish was ahead of preseason expectations, and delighted the coaching staff.

“We kind of figured it would come down to our sixth and seventh runners, and it turned out that they finished fourth and fifth today for us,” said coach Jay Lindsey. “Our focus today was keeping the Wiscasset runners in sight and beating them. We kind of figured it would be between them and us for second place. Now we can turn our focus to next week at regionals and try and at least qualify for the state meet.”

Dan Soltan and Nick Downing finished sixth and eighth respectively for the Ramblers to lead the team to its runner-up finish.