LEWISTON – February 14.

Back in November, on the first day of practice, Lewiston High School girls’ hockey coach Ron Dumont scribbled that date (it looked more like ‘214’) onto his hockey gloves, the pair he wore for practice.

He looked around at the girls, and asked them if they knew what that meant.

“Valentine’s Day,” most of them said.

“Well, yeah,” Dumont replied. “But it’s more than that. I plan on having a date that day with 16 girls. They all looked at me funny, so I told them, ‘Yes, that’s Velentine’s Day, but it’s also the state championship, and you’ve got to start believing you can get there.'”

Most of the girls on the team thought Dumont was crazy.

“They even said early on, ‘What are you, crazy, coach? We’ve got all of this to go through and it’s only November.'”

Dumont wasn’t crazy.

Or maybe he was.

November ticked into December and January. Lewiston couldn’t lose. Then the Devils hit a rough patch, with a pair of ties and a loss in a 10-day stretch.

He’d scratched the date onto his gloves, to show them he was serious. The team took it to, well, heart. He showed them his gloves at every practice, and demanded a little bit more hard work each time out.

“At the beginning of the season, we set that goal, and we weren’t going to fall short of that, no matter what,” Cloutier said. “Every day, we were reminded, 2-14, this is where we want to be. We put all of our energy into that.”

All of that energy translated into a February 14 none of the 16 Lewiston skaters are likely to forget. It is, after all, Valentine’s Day.