FARMINGTON – Having been not quite themselves down the stretch of the regular season, the Mt. Blue boys wanted to regain their identity in Wednesday night’s Eastern Class A preliminary with Lewiston.
So naturally, the Cougars crashed the boards like Moses Malone, defended like Bill Russell and even charged loose balls like Brooks Robinson.
The sixth-seeded Cougars put together that kind of old-time effort and dominated No. 11 Lewiston with a 52-32 win. Mt. Blue will meet No. 3 Gardiner in the quarterfinals at 4 p.m. Saturday at the Augusta Civic Center.
“We’ve been struggling lately, but we wanted to come out and really show why we can make it to Augusta,” said junior Noah Paytas, who tallied a game-high 13 points, along with six rebounds, for the Cougars.
Mt. Blue (13-6) took control of the game with a 12-3 run in the second quarter, then pulled away by holding Lewiston (9-10) scoreless from the middle of the third quarter to the the middle of the fourth quarter.
“We picked up the tempo defensively and that seemed to be the difference in the game,” Mt. Blue coach Jim Bessey said. “I think we were solid in the halfcourt in the second half. By midway through the third quarter, momentum was on our side and all we had to do was simply play halfway decent, and we were going to win.”
“They’re a great defensive team. That’s what they hang their hat on at the end of the day,” Lewiston coach Pat Blais said. “They were able to take us out of some sets that we wanted to get into, and I don’t remember us getting many offensive rebounds (Mt. Blue finished with a 17-4 edge), so we were pretty much one-and-done the whole game.”
Neither team shot the ball very well in the first half, but the Cougars got the boost they needed early in the second quarter thanks to a terrific hustle play by Arthur Trask. The junior guard chased down a long rebound along the sideline on a missed 3-point attempt by the Blue Devils, leapt into the air as he was going out of bounds and, like the aforementioned Robinson trying to gun down a runner at first from the third base line, fired an off-balance pass to the other end of the court. A hustling John Moloney beat all of the Blue Devils down the floor and collected the pass for an easy lay-up that gave the Cougars a 14-8 lead.
“I wasn’t even sure if I’d knocked the ball out or (Lewiston) knocked it out,” Trask said, “but I went for it, saw white in the corner of my eye and gunned it and John Moloney was there.”
Even though the Devils played solid defense and held them to just 38 percent shooting, the Cougars made the most of a 10-3 advantage on the offensive boards to build a 10-point cushion going into the halftime break.
“They worked very well on the offensive glass,” said Blais. “We knew they could get after it, but they did a much better job on the offensive boards than what we’ve seen before and what we really expected.”
Much of that work was done by the Cougars’ 6-foot-1 “big men”, Paytas and Adam Gilbert (11 points, 10 rebounds), who were active at both ends of the floor and were either rewarded for their hard work by Trask (five assists) and Moloney (four assists) with passes into the paint or with putbacks off of the offensive glass.
Joe Stachowiak had 12 points and Jon Fournier nine for the Blue Devils, who like Mt. Blue, struggled in the second half of the season after a 6-0 start but couldn’t recover quickly enough.
“We’re losing six seniors who, in their own ways, have really meant a lot to this team,” Blais said. “They’re a bunch of great guys, a great group of kids, and no matter what we went through, they just never quit.”
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