BANGOR – The Tooth Fairy has never been so generous.

Dirigo’s Holly Knight took one for the team in the second quarter of Friday night’s Class C girls’ basketball championship, in the form of an inadvertent forearm shiver from all 6-foot-4 of Dexter’s Ashley Ames.

Knight will need to have a front tooth capped. As a souvenir, though, the deduction from her dental work ranks right up there with a Gold Ball and a few strands of twine from the Bangor Auditorium buckets.

“It was just shock. First I didn’t know what went on,” Knight said through her remodeled smile, shadowed by a split lower lip. “Then I saw my tooth on the ground in front of me. Then I saw my hand covered in blood. That’s when I started panicking.”

Dexter didn’t see Knight again until the second half.

She was tentative, right? Worried that she’d get another taste of Ames’ now-bandaged elbow, no?

Think again.

Instead of kicking back with an ice pack, Knight knocked down a 15-footer in Ames’ face, just a minute into the third quarter.

Rather than sipping Gatorade through a straw, Knight then spotted up for a 3-pointer, something she’s prone to do about as frequently as Larry Bird used to dunk.

Not lamenting the sandwich she’d have trouble eating after the game, Knight teamed with Michelle Holmquist, Alexa Kaubris and Shannon Daley to sandwich Ashley and her 6-foot-6 sister, Mallory, at their every beck and pivot.

And she was on the floor at the end when Daley dropped in a six-to-eight-footer from the baseline just inside the horn for a 44-42 Dirigo triumph, the Cougars’ sixth state championship in this astonishing era, their eighth overall.

Don’t mind Knight if the caps turn out to be gold.

“I knew I had to come back and play strong and forget about what happened,” she said.

Knight’s sacrifice highlighted a smothering, team defensive effort that left both Ames girls with a crooked countenance, too.

Those frowns weren’t from a shortage of choppers. Dirigo knows that look anywhere. It was sheer exasperation.

“We just talked about sandwiching them and making it hard for them,” said senior Brooke Weston, who played one slice of bread against Ashley Ames during Knight’s absence at the end of the first half. “We could hear them complaining about how hard it was for them to get open. They were getting frustrated. That’s just what we wanted to do.”

Coach Gavin Kane concocted the double, double, toil-and-trouble concept after watching a Dexter-Stearns game earlier in the season.

Stearns sagged into a zone and dared Dexter’s guards to shoot from the perimeter. And since Friday was the final game of the season, I’m not giving away anyone’s game plan by saying this: They don’t shoot. Ever.

Forget the 3-point stripe. Dirigo conceded 12-footers from the baseline all night long and paid not a single toll.

“They just have that incredible size,” Kane said. “Coming into tonight, I didn’t know if there was a realistic possibility of shutting them down. We certainly worked our tails off. I thought we made them work for everything.”

Ashley Ames finished with game highs of 20 points, 12 rebounds and eight blocked shots. But she didn’t score in the second or fourth quarters.

Held scoreless in the first half, Mallory Ames ended with five points.

“We tried to sandwich everywhere we could,” Kane said. “A couple times we left Ashley open in the middle of the paint, where she’s deadly shooting the ball from that 10-foot range.”

Dirigo’s smaller but more athletic frontcourt players played the towering two to at least a stalemate.

Holmquist produced 11 points and eight rebounds. Alexa Kaubris chalked up eight points, Knight a gritty six, Daley a giant four.

“We figured if we could sandwich them and do that for the entire game,” Kaubris said, “we’d be looking pretty good.”

Well, some better than others, until the dentist intervenes.

“One of the girls brought something over and handed it to me,” said Kane. “I thought it was something that came off the floor. It was Holly’s tooth.”

The coach smiled. So did Knight, flashing the kind of space that can be filled only by a state title.

Kalle Oakes is a staff writer. His e-mail is [email protected]