STANDISH –

Remember this.

Being worth the alleged thousand words, pictures aren’t supposed to need captions. Bold print in a newspaper or a homemade headline scrawled by a red Sharpie should be extraneous.

Brian Dube felt that his Livermore Falls High School baseball team could use the reinforcement, the redundancy, the reality check. So there it is, still hanging in the Andies’ locker room: A photo of St. Dominic Regional High School pig-piling, back-slapping, doing the things 17-year-olds do when they’ve overcome a playoff deficit that felt bigger than all the world’s problems.

The motivational tool was nothing personal. St. Dom’s could have been 0-16 this season, with Winthrop or Dirigo setting up shop Tuesday in the opposite dugout at Mahaney Diamond. Livermore Falls didn’t associate its queasy feeling with the who, but the what.

“It’s seriously been a driving force all year,” Dube said. “It wasn’t necessarily St. Dom’s. We didn’t really care who we played, but just to get back to this game.”

Remember this, the bulletin board admonishes. Not that Jake Marceau couldn’t recite all the harrowing details of that 2007 regional semifinal defeat in Auburn, recalling the hit batter, the walk, the would-be sacrifice bunt and the throwing error the way some kids recite Kanye West lyrics.

“We had it, 7-6, in the bottom of the seventh,” Marceau said. “We lost it. It wasn’t so much anything they did. It was just mistakes on our part. We had a young team.”

Twelve months older, three seniors wiser, one heartbreak tougher, Livermore Falls stood up on a drizzly, downright cold afternoon and took out years of frustration on behalf of everyone else in Western Class C.

With a classy, tidy and altogether convincing 3-1 triumph, Livermore Falls captured its first regional crown since 1999 and stopped St. Dom’s from celebrating its fifth in a row.

Now, the yellowing newspaper clipping comes down, soon to be replaced by a greener, more gleeful one.

Now, the Andies are free to forget.

“Freshman year, we told Coach this would happen,” said center fielder Kevin Gats. “We told him we wanted to go all the way. Now we get one more game.”

Livermore Falls (17-3) welcomes Searsport here at 5 p.m. Saturday, with a state title in the balance.

So much is said, begrudgingly, about private, parochial and college preparatory schools in Maine Principals’ Association tournaments. Detractors decry St. Dom’s supposed advantages, namely its potential to pull students from a dozen neighboring communities and the freedom to “recruit” through newspaper and television advertising and word-of-mouth.

Thank you, Andies, for showing that the shrinking, tight-knit communities that comprise most of Class C have a distinct advantage of their own.

Consider Livermore Falls’ three seniors – Marceau, Gats and Zach Keene. We’re talking about boys who’ve built chemistry since they were pushing Tonka trucks in each other’s sandboxes, or learning the finer points of the double play, corner kick or pick and roll under a Little League or Area Youth Sports banner.

The box scores will show that two sophomores, Derrick Castonguay and Willie Brown, logged three of the four sectional playoff pitching victories and were doggone near unhittable doing it.

Remember this: Tuesday undeniably was a senior moment.

Gats cracked two singles, scored two runs and cut down St. Dom’s potential first run of the game at the plate. It was his seventh outfield assist of the season.

Marceau started on the mound, squirmed out of two potential jams and caught Brown’s five, brilliant, hitless innings of relief. Plus, he put the Andies on top with a line-drive, two-run home run.

Keene played an errorless shortstop, as usual.

“They’ve been around,” Dube said. “You won’t find three better kids.”

Crazy thought, but this (or Saturday) could be the last Livermore Falls championship in any sport. Enrollment is at a low ebb as jobs and families continue to migrate south. That sacrilegious talk of a someday merger with Jay is bound to become more than a murmur.

So somebody take a picture. Put Marceau, Gats and Keene in the front row. Frame it and give it a special place in that trophy case.

Any ideas for a caption?

Kalle Oakes is a staff writer. His e-mail is [email protected].