By Justin Pelletier,Staff Writer

The surprise in Dan Maxfield’s voice was hard to hide.

“The game’s this week?” Maxfield half-asked, half-stated, as if he should have known better. “Wow. That all seems like such a long time ago.”

Though it has only been eight years since Maxfield graduated from Oxford Hills High School in Paris and donned a jersey for the East squad in the Maine Shrine Lobster Bowl, it feels like an eternity.

“I remember it was the most exciting game I’ve ever played in,” Maxfield said. “The particulars are hard to remember after that, though. My life has taken such a turn since, it’s like I’ve put athletics all the way at the back of my mind.”

It’s not that Maxfield wants to forget the details. By all accounts, Maxfield enjoyed – and understood – the true meaning of the game.

“The game itself is tremendous in itself,” said Maxwell, “but it’s the whole build-up, the week before. When we went down to the hospital, that was dramatic, powerful.”

Before any of the 90 football players and 55 cheerleaders make it to game day, the Shrine sponsors a trip to the Shriners Hospital in Springfield, Mass. There, the players and cheerleaders visit some of the children receiving care.

For Maxfield, being there was powerful enough, but little did he know just how much the Shrine would impact his own life.

Maxfield, who played defense in the 1998 Lobster Bowl, was in a motorcycle accident the following summer.

“June 20,” said Maxfield. “I remember it was Father’s Day.”

The accident, in which Maxfield and a passenger were thrown from the motorcycle he was driving after a collision with a tractor-trailer truck, put him in intensive care at Central Maine Medical Center for five weeks. For four of those weeks, Maxfield slept.

That was when the wheels started to turn.

“It all happened around me, while I was in a coma.”

His coach at Oxford Hills, Ted Moccia, and Moccia’s longtime friend and fellow football coach Dick Leavitt hatched a plan.

“I saw the accident in the paper and called Ted immediately,” said Leavitt, who will be back at Lewiston High School this season as an assistant coach. “I wanted to see if it was really him. I made contact with the Shriners as soon as I could. I was honored to be able to do that for him.”

Thanks to Leavitt’s call, when Maxfield awoke, and once he was feeling better, he went to the Springfield hospital he had visited as a football player less than a year earlier. This time, he was a patient.

“It was a quick stay, really,” Maxfield said. “I was only there a week and a half, but there was a lot of irony in all of it. It really put everything into perspective.”

In an effort to give back to the Shriners, Maxfield started printing T-shirts, calling his fundraising effort Team 74, the number he wore at Oxford Hills.

“It started small,” Maxfield said, “but it really caught on. People kept asking where they could get the shirts.”

Maxfield and his mother, Lynne, had more printed. In all, they raised more than $3,000 for the Shriners.

“It was just a simple way for us to do what we could, to show appreciation,” Maxfield said.

Reached this week at her home in Harrison, Lynne said that just recently, at Harrison’s Old Home Days, she ran into someone wearing a Team 74 shirt.

“I had to go say hello,” Lynne said. “I was thrilled to meet up with him. He told me he was a Shriner, and he said he knew Dan was from around here and figured he should wear that shirt.”

In 2000, Maxfield returned to the Lobster Bowl field to present the Shriners with the money he had raised with Team 74. Since then, his life has moved on.

Maxfield is long done playing football. The birth of his second child imminent, Maxfield now works at his mother’s company, Decorating Plus in Auburn, as a project manager. Still, though, he remembers the week back in 1998, and how quickly it changed in 1999.

“You don’t really fully appreciate it until you go down there,” Maxfield said. “And even then, to have to go down there again as a patient, to actually live it and benefit from their generosity, it’s just unbelievable. It’s such a great organization.”

This year’s game is Friday, July 28, at Waterhouse Field in Biddeford.