AUBURN – Bim Gibson had time on his hands and an appreciation of history, community and basketball in his heart.

The end result goes on display this weekend, in a building gripped by ghosts of tournaments past.

Gibson, a social studies teacher at Auburn Middle School, has penned a 74-page paperback book, “History of Edward Little/Lewiston Basketball.”

It originally was intended as a tournament program for the Auburn-Lewiston Sports Hall of Fame Basketball Tournament, scheduled Friday and Saturday at Lewiston Armory. Now it’s a keepsake available for $10. All proceeds from the games and the historical record will benefit local high school sports.

“I’ve already told the hall that all the proceeds from the book I want to go back to St. Dom’s, Lewiston and Edward Little in some form,” Gibson said.

Gibson intended for the book to debut at the holiday tournament. When it became apparent that EL and Lewiston would meet in the Eastern Class A football semifinals on Nov. 8, Mark Hartnett of Falcon Printing shipped the finished product to him that week.

Hartnett, an EL sports parent, provided his services free. Sixty books already have been sold.

“The annual banquet is great, but I thought the best way to raise the community’s awareness of the hall and what they have to offer was to have a tournament,” Gibson said. “As a teacher, you’re always saying to the kids ideas are great, but follow through. It started off as, ‘OK, I need to put a program together for the tournament.’ And it turned into this.”

After beginning with a brief synopsis of the sports’ century-old history in the Twin Cities, Gibson dives into the thankless tasks of ranking the top 20 boys’ varsity teams and the top 10 girls’ squads in EL and Lewiston history.

Each team page is complete with a photograph, a list of the five starters and a detailed account of their special season.

“If you’re going to start ranking people, you’d better have reasons behind it,” said Gibson. “I want people to argue with me, because it gets them talking.”

Gibson ranked Edward Little’s 1920 New England championship team just ahead of Lewiston’s state title-winning outfit of 1960.

With girls’ basketball only sanctioned as a sport in Maine since 1975, the historian had an easier task. Gibson chose the 1999 Lewiston team that rolled to the Western Maine crown.

As public address announcer for EL sports and a sideline reporter for Maine Public Broadcasting’s coverage of the high school basketball tournament, Gibson is a local celebrity.

“I never played basketball in high school, but it seems like I keep falling into it,” said Gibson, who organized the local YMCA youth basketball program prior to his teaching career.

Getting to the bottom of the Twin Cities’ hoop archives was an exhausting task. Gibson said both public libraries and both high school athletic directors — Jason Fuller of Lewiston and Dan Deshaies of EL — were generous with their time and resources.

He gained access to every school yearbook and was never charged for photocopies or microfilm time. Between March and August, Gibson estimated that he spent more than 500 hours researching and writing the project.

“It’s all I did. But it was fun,” Gibson said. “It was like a little puzzle. I’m not a writer. I can present facts. I wrote the way you and I would talk. That’s about all I can do.”

The book also features an all-decade team for each school, including each player’s photograph and a paragraph about his or her career.

There’s also a chapter covering the first Lewiston-EL basketball game ever played at the Armory in 1925, one that ended in a bench-clearing brawl after a 14-12 Eddies victory.

“Nothing seems to bring a community together, good or bad, quite like sports. That’s always had an effect on me,” Gibson said. “When you bring those interests in sports and history together, it’s cool. The more I got into it, the more fun I had with it, so I just kept going and going and going. Once you do something, you’ve got to finish it. As a teacher, that’s your message to the kids.”

Basketball seemed a natural sport for such a project, Gibson said, because the statistics always have been readily available in newspaper box scores. Other games would provide a trickier test.

That hasn’t stopped some of his first readers from clamoring for a second installment on football, baseball or hockey.

“Not having any kids, and being at the stage where I probably never will, (this will show) I was here,” Gibson said. “Will I ever do it again? Probably not. But if you’ve got something to share with others, why not do it?”