By Randy Whitehouse,Staff Writer

AUGUSTA – Coach Shane Slicer perfectly summed up the impact Oxford Hills winning the Class A baseball championship Tuesday had on the big bi-partisan crowd at Morton Field.

“I think they shocked everybody in the stands,” he said.

If the Shane Slicer of three months ago had been in attendance, he might have been among those shaking his head in disbelief.

“This is really special, because my expectations really weren’t a state championship,” he said following the Vikings’ 9-4 upset of Westbrook. “I think this way every year. I hope we can get 10-6 and compete.”

“Then I started looking at the KVAC,” he added. “Everybody lost their ace. This was the first year we really didn’t have two awesome starters like we’ve had the last five years, but I knew (ace) Matt (McDonnell) could compete, and I thought we could win this league. It was wide open.”

The unpredictable nature of the KVAC was at once heartening and disheartening to Slicer, because his team was just as unpredictable.

“They’re the type of team that when they got down, they didn’t bounce back real well for a while,” Slicer said. “They worked hard, but they play better when they’re loose.”

“I had to change a little bit,” he added. “I’m kind of a rah-rah guy, and they taught me rah-rah’ makes them a little nervous, and they play tentative.”

Slicer decided the best thing to do was to keep his team loose, let the seniors ease into leadership roles and hope team chemistry would develop.

“We don’t have a ton of seniors, but they carried the freshmen and the younger guys and treated them like varsity baseball players,” he said.

A core of seniors led by McDonnell, Corey Saunders, Kelvin Decato, Kyle Keniston and Derek Varney helped show the way to freshmen contributors Chris Roy, Ryan Yates and Justin Frechette and sophomore Ethan Sutton. Juniors Russell Estes, Chris Jennings, Ben Ryerson and Alex Waite quietly solidified the Vikings offensively and defensively.

Just as the team appeared to be hitting their stride with big mid-season wins over Mt. Blue and Mt. Ararat, they hit a speed bump with losses to Lewiston and Edward Little. Then Waite, their No. 3 starter and a potent bat in the middle of the lineup, went down at the end of May with a dislocated elbow.

A loss to Gardiner in the KVAC championship game seemed to shatter their confidence, and it carried over into the early stages of their quarterfinal with Skowhegan, in which they fell behind, 5-1.

Fortunately for the Vikings, Chris Jennings pitched 6 1/3 innings of superb relief to make a four-run rally in the seventh inning possible. Kyle Keniston drove home the winning run in the eighth, and, though it would take nearly two weeks for everyone to find out, Oxford Hills would be unstoppable from there.

“We went in, I think it was the Monday after the Skowhegan game, and we hit for an hour-and-a-half, and that got our confidence back,” Keniston said. “You’ve got to have confidence. You have to trust yourself.”

They came out swinging in their semifinal game with Bangor and won 10-1. In each of their last three games, the Vikings took a first inning lead, scoring a combined 13 first inning runs. They scored 32 runs overall in the final three games.

“Our bats were hot all playoffs,” McDonnell said. “We had a close call in our quarterfinal game against Skowhegan. We came through in that last inning, and ever since that last inning, we’ve been rolling from there.”

Even a rainy nine-day wait between the regional semifinals and finals couldn’t cool off the offense, and thanks to a clutch relief effort by Saunders, the Vikings held off a valiant comeback attempt by Edward Little in their 13-8 triumph in the Eastern Maine title game.

A good night’s sleep was all that separated them from a date with Western Maine powerhouse Westbrook. Eastern Maine hadn’t beaten Western Maine in Class A since 1997, so it seemed a foregone conclusion that the Vikings’ run was about to end as it had in their last state championship game in 2002 – with a loss.

“I don’t think many people expected us to come this far,” said Saunders. “We came in here hoping to win, but a lot of people had Westbrook as the favorite. We were pretty much the underdogs, but we fixed that.”

They fixed it, with a patient, opportunistic first inning against Westbrook ace Jordan Purington and a gritty complete game from Jennings, the Vikings’ crafty No. 4 starter, who had a swollen middle finger on his throwing hand after dislocating it in a collision at the plate the day before.

At the end of the first day of summer, everyone at Morton Field was shocked but the Vikings. They even had Slicer, ever the skeptic, believing.

“When they’re playing well, they know how to keep playing well,” he said. “They know how to win.”