LISBON FALLS – We’ve heard it before: Lisbon High School has small football players and not enough football players. It lost the top two athletes in the Campbell Conference to graduation, besides.

Logic dictated that the leftovers in the black-and-white jerseys were too tiny and too inexperienced. It’s a whisper that has tickled the ear of high school pigskin enthusiasts frequently over the two decades that Coach Dick Mynahan has guided the Greyhounds. And as has become the local custom, Lisbon is laughing in the face of that logic.

Three games into the current campaign, the Greyhounds have been an underdog at least once. Some would argue twice. Not only is Lisbon undefeated, it has been dominant, outscoring its foes by an aggregate score of 60-7 on the shoulders of a defense that hopes to spin its third straight shutout tonight at Madison.

“Every time we take the field, the other team is going to be bigger than us,” said senior cornerback and all-purpose running back Joe Stevens. “But speed kills, and it shows on the field.”

At 5-foot-8 and 160 pounds, Stevens is the median size of a Lisbon defensive player this fall, and yes, that includes the tackles and ends.

Mark Stambach, a two-way lineman who checks in at six feet, 225, is the only returning player tipping the scales with a ‘2’ as the first digit. Defensive ends Zach Bubar (6-2, 170) and Devan Knight (5-9, 155) are miniature by comparison. And we won’t even talk about linebacker Ryan Giusto (5-5, 150).

There are two crucial common denominators among all those Greyhounds, great and small. Each is a senior. Each had the benefit of at least watching the unforgettable goal-line stand that allowed Lisbon to fend off Foxcroft last November for the Class C Gold Ball.

Watching is the operative word. Having the best seat in the house to see Levi Ervin, Elijah Trefts and a senior-dominated group haul off its ultimate goal was enough to fuel a winter’s supply of warm afternoons and evenings in the weight room.

“That’s not our state championship,” Giusto said. “We were just there for it.”

Goals are the same but strategies are different for this year’s Greyhounds, who lack Ervin’s Division I athleticism roaming the middle at safety and Trefts’ looming presence smothering the run and clamping his mitts around the quarterback. Even the coaching staff shrank in the offseason, with Mynahan’s perennial sidekick John Murphy retiring and handing over the defense to Randy Ridley.

Lisbon has confounded the larger likes of Livermore Falls, Dirigo and Mattanawcook with quickness. The Greyhounds use blitz packages to their advantage, swarm every ball carrier and put a helmet on the football whenever possible. If there’s a stellar solo play to be made, it usually comes from one of Giusto’s senior partners in crime at linebacker, Jesse Moan or Dan Willis.

“Every tackle is a pack of dogs,” Giusto said with a smile, echoing the public address announcer’s traditional Saturday afternoon refrain at Thompson Field.

Only Livermore Falls was successful at sustaining anything that resembled a drive, and the Andies lost two fumbles in Lisbon’s 12-7 triumph on opening night.

“Our defense is definitely a good defense, but it’s far from great,” Moan said. “If we were truly a great defense, we’d always run out of our base. We run a lot of other things. Coach knows exactly what he’s doing. A lot of times he calls the offensive play before it happens.”

That preparation was never more apparent than against Mattanawcook, the powerhouse from faraway Lincoln that ripped Maine Central Institute the previous Friday, 60-0.

Mattanawcook was the only team to knock off the Greyhounds in last year’s run to Lisbon’s first state title since 1997, and the Lynx looked unstoppable in two Eastern Class C wins. They showed up with 60 players, which as it turned out wasn’t nearly enough depth to deal with the hungry ‘Hounds on a hot afternoon.

“We knew they weren’t going to run up the score on us like that, but yeah, shutting them out was pretty much unexpected,” Bubar said.

Lisbon’s sterling start forces Mynahan into the balancing act of defending his team to anyone who expected a dramatic drop this season while making sure the Greyhounds’ tunnel vision remains intact. He reminds everyone that Lisbon has six league games left, including showdowns with fellow Western C playoff contenders Boothbay, Jay and Old Orchard Beach.

“You think about different scenarios to start the season, and this is obviously the best we could have imagined,” Mynahan said. “This is the smallest team I’ve ever had at Lisbon, but they believe in themselves.”

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