Exhibition games are notorious for liberal substitution patterns and less-than-tidy basketball.

So
nobody was a worse critic of Rangeley coach Heidi Deery than Deery
himself for furnishing the forum that led to Emily Carrier’s nearly
season-ending broken wrist.

“She missed the whole month of
January. She got hurt in a Christmas tournament game with three seconds
left,” Deery said. “I’ve been having nightmares about ‘Why was she in?'”

Fortunately
for the Lakers, Carrier is back for the games that matter most. She
combined with sister Chantal Carrier for 23 points in Tuesday’s
quarterfinal win over Kents Hill.

Carrier was unavailable for Rangeley’s two previous wins over Kents Hills, by five and eight points.

Rangeley
clung to a single-digit lead for most of the tournament rematch before
Carrier scored two big buckets in the Lakers’ fourth-quarter finishing
kick.

“It took us a while to get into a rhythm,” said Carrier, a sophomore, “but once we settled down it was good.”

 Perfect fit

The last time Travis Magnusson was on the Augusta Civic Center floor for a high school basketball game, he was clad in the freen-and-white of Georges Valley. The Thomaston school’s only 2,000-career-point scorer suffered a rare cold shooting spell in the 2000 Western C championship game against Jay.

Monday night held a much happier result for Magnusson, who returned to the ACC as coach of top-seeded Livermore Falls, which dispatched his alma mater, 61-47, in the Western C quarterfinals.

It was anything but a bittersweet feeling for Magnusson, who led the Andies to their first win in Augusta in over two decades.

“I’ve been with this group for three years now, so it’s all about them,” Magnusson said. “They haven’t won a playoff game here in 20 years, I believe, so that was my whole focus. I’ll always have a special place in my heart for Georges Valley, but tonight it’s about us.”

He said he didn’t have to impart much wisdom to the Andies about playing at the Civic Center. Many of the Livermore Falls seniors had played there in a quarterfinal loss in 2008, and then again in the annual Christmas tournament at the arena.

It’s their first time with a crowd like this, so I was a little nervous about that,” he said. “But they handled it well.”
They’ll have a bigger crowd to handle Thursday night when they face third-seeded Hall-Dale.

 More time

If practice makes perfect, Kents Hill girls’ coach Tom Marshall would love to have another month with his team. Kents Hill, which fell to Rangeley in Tuesday’s semifinals, didn’t have the benefit of preseason and holiday tournaments. And the Huskies’ sporadic schedule was a mixture of prep school rivals, Class D independents and a handful of East-West Conference teams.

“They’re great kids, but we’ve had 22 practices all year. I bet Rangeley had at least 40,” Marshall said. “We didn’t start until Dec. 1. We missed two weeks at Christmas.” Marshall last coached at the civic center in 2001, when he led the Monmouth boys to the Western D championship game, a loss to powerful Valley.