BANGOR – The last Eastern Class A boys’ basketball championship to be played at Bangor Auditorium for the foreseeable future, maybe ever, was, well, it was ugly.

Homely, at times, as the 26 rows of corn-yellow bleacher seats that look like they were borrowed from the set of “Hoosiers” and ascend to a height that should make anybody but a professional rock climber uncomfortable.

As positively bulldog-like, on occasion, as a roof that sometimes holds water as effectively as many other people who were born in the first half of the 20th century.

More unbecoming, in snippets, than water that flows from the tap in an alarmingly yellowish color if you’re one of the first people in the arena needing to wash your hands on a given night.

Yet in so many ways, it was the perfect ending to a Grimm fairy tale, the signature in the lower, right-hand corner of a Rockwell original.

This is how we do it here in the boonies: Below the rim. No player more important than another. Five defenders rotating in cooperative, almost intuitive union.

True, there were multiple failures to finish fast breaks with uncontested lay-ups. Too many hair-graying segments of two, three, even four consecutive misses from close range. Scoreless streaks even longer than the Yankees concocted in Games 4, 5, 6 and 7 of last year’s American League Championship Series.

Coyote ugly. What a personality, though.

Lurking among the highlights only a mother could love was a stirring comeback by a team that could dribble a basketball from here to its home gymnasium on a sunlit, summer day.

Ninth-seeded Hampden Academy emerged from the Heal Point weeds and took down the top two teams in the regional, punctuated by a 47-40 expulsion of No. 2 Oxford Hills late, and I do mean late, Monday night.

Hampden will return Saturday for the Class A championship. They’ll play another game, hopefully more tense and traumatic than this one. Parents and grandparents will wear out their digital cameras. One team will take home a Gold Ball with its medicine kit and dry erase board.

And then, barring a prodigious paradigm shift in Aroostook and Penobscot County’s economic climate, they’ll never come back.

Class A’s Eastern regional is moving to Augusta Civic Center next February, primarily because East has moved West, and South. Parents can’t find as many jobs around here any longer. They don’t have babies and buy homes here anymore, either.

Big schools like Bangor, Brewer and Hampden are shrinking, and they’re in the minority.

The move 70 miles down the Interstate is designed to accommodate the majority, chief among them Oxford Hills. When the Vikings arrived home this morning, presumably on the wrong side of 2 a.m., they had five hours to rest (yeah, right) before it was back to school for a day of exams and study hall catnaps.

Next year, Hampden gets to make the one-hour bus ride during school vacation week. And right now, they couldn’t care less.

“It means a lot to be the last Eastern Maine team to host the state final here,” said senior co-captain Patrick Moran. “The Class A tournament has been here a long time. This is exactly where we wanted to be.”

Things weren’t as pretty on the green-and-gold side of the venerable arena. Bangor has been a house of horrors for the Vikings since they were assigned to Eastern Maine (look that one up in your gazetteer and scratch your head) in the mid-1990s.

In some bizarre way, Monday night’s star-crossed second half in which Oxford Hills shot 4-for-32 from the floor probably was the way it was supposed to end.

Someday, the Vikings will remember the first half in which they played majestic, half-court defensive basketball, attacked the boards with abandon and made themselves at home.

But it’ll take time, and a willingness to look between the lines, to make the Vikings see Monday’s result as anything but pure, unadulterated ugliness.

Look again, objectively, and you’ll see a game that represented everything the Class A tournament at Bangor Auditorium was about.

Tough. Timeless. Terrific, in its own way.

Go ahead, even if you’re from Oxford County, and tell me you won’t miss this ugly ol’ place.

Kalle Oakes is a staff writer. His e-mail is .