PORTLAND — Stopping an explosive offense is difficult enough. Stopping it when you can’t find the ball — impossible.

For the first quarter-plus of Saturday’s Class C state championship, the Dirigo defense was having a hard time just identifying where the pigskin was, and the results were predictable.

“They carry out their fakes very well,” senior defensive end Kyle Hutchinson said of the Foxcroft offense. “A lot of times they’d counter toward the middle and I’d still be running toward the end wondering where the ball is.”

Too often, all the Cougars had to to was look in the end zone. Foxcroft scored on its first three possessions in a wild first 13 minutes to take a 20-14 lead.

Unable to get pressure on QB Ryan Stroud and bottle-up running back Ian Champeon, the Cougars looked helpless against the Ponies’ express, which mounted scoring drives of 69, 56 and 73 yards.

But there was no panic on the Dirigo sideline. The offense provided answers to every Foxcroft score, which helped, and so did the knowledge that the Cougars had made slow starts a habit all season.

“It’s a bad habit,” Hutchinson said. “We’ve just got to work through it. That’s been the solution all year.”

Another solution was to alter the defensive front, which ultimately shut down the Ponies in Dirigo’s 37-20 win.

“We started switching it up,” Dirigo coach Doug Gilbert said. “We were running a ’44’ (four linemen and four linebackers), and then we decided they were getting used to that, so we started running ’52’ just to them a little bit of a change.”

Change is good as far as the Cougars are concerned. After torching them for 122 passing yards on the first three drives, Stroud and Foxcroft managed just 46 passing yards, and zero points, the rest of the game.

“We finally started putting pressure on the quarterback,” said senior defensive end Tyler Chiasson, who had a key knockdown of a Stroud pass on a 3rd-and-7 that forced the Ponies to punt for the first time midway through the second quarter.. 

Chiasson and Hutchinson (two sacks) closed the first half with back-to-back sacks to preserve a 21-20 lead. The sacks seemed to deliver a message to the Ponies, who came out for the second half less willing to go to the air.

“Like anybody, he didn’t like getting hit,” Hutchinson said of Stroud. “When we started putting the sacks on him, he got happy feet.”

“I don’t know if they couldn’t get to our defensive ends or what,” Gilbert said, “but our defensive ends did a very good job in there.”