Two years ago, when Doug Flutie converted a drop kick in his last game for the New England Patriots, historians had to go back to 1941 to find the last time someone had pulled off such a feat in the NFL.

If Mountain Valley decides to allow Justin Staires to fulfill his wish of attempting a drop kick in an upcoming game, as reported in this space last week, high school football historians won’t have to go back quite as far to find the last time it was accomplished.

Leavitt High School assistant principal Mike Haley believes the last player to drop kick in a Maine high school game played for him when he was coaching Waterville High School in the early 1970s.

Haley said a transfer student by the name of Mike Finnegan re-introduced the drop kick to Maine in 1973.

“He was the son of a colonel in the Air Force who was stationed in Thailand for several years,” Haley said. “He learned how to drop kick by playing rugby over there.”

Finnegan’s father transferred to run the AROTC program at Colby College in 1973 and Haley discovered the young Finnegan’s unique talent prior to the season.

“He was just dubbing around before practice one day and I saw him kick,” Haley said. “He kicked it on his instep, he wouldn’t kick it from the side. He would turn his foot a little bit and hit it right on his shoelaces. He put it end-over-end and he put it right out of sight. I’m telling you, he could really punch it.”

By Haley’s recollection, Finnegan kick 15 PATs and three field goals using the technique and would even drop kicked on kickoffs. He recalled Finnegan booting one kickoff out of the back of the end zone at Lewiston Athletic Park, prompting former Lewiston Sun reporter Ted Taylor to rave about Finnegan’s technique.

Get in the wheelbarrow

Fans attending Leavitt games this year may have noticed one of the Hornets pushing a wheelbarrow to the team’s post-game huddle.

No, it’s not that the Hornets have some grounds-keeping to attend to, even though their offense has been tearing up the field this season. The wheelbarrow is a symbol of their theme for this season, which was inspired by the 1999 St. Louis Rams.

“After Kurt Warner won a couple of games, there was a story that (head coach) Dick Vermeil told about believing, and whether or not they believed they could win a Super Bowl,” Hathaway said. “It was a story about a guy who walks across a wire over a canyon with a wheelbarrow. The end of the story is the guy says ‘Does anybody believe me?’, and one guy says ‘Yeah, I’ll bet anybody here 20 bucks that you can do it.’ He’s the only guy that believes. Everybody bets him. And the guy on the wire says ‘If you really believed, you’d get in the wheelbarrow.’

“We’ve got a lot of good athletes and a lot of good players, but one of the things we’re trying to stress is everyone playing as a team. We all want to be in the wheelbarrow together,” he added.

Leavitt hopes to get everybody back in the wheelbarrow after suffering its first loss of the season against Morse last week. The Hornets host winless Belfast Friday night.

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