BIDDEFORD — Went to the Maine Shrine Lobster Bowl Classic on Saturday. Tecmo Bowl broke out.

Perhaps you remember that video game in all its 16-bit glory.

Pick your favorite team, give yourself one rainy weekend, and you could discern both the unchanging defensive patterns and the two or three foolproof offensive plays that would stymie them every time.

Given the chance to name your final score against the computer drones, that score typically was 112-0.

OK, there was lot more defense played than that in the 21st annual all-star football game at Waterhouse Field. And with gifted recent high school graduates by the dozen on both sidelines, it was a two-way street.

But just as technology has transformed every joystick-controlled football juggernaut from 11 blurry dots to virtual reality, high school football in Maine has evolved, almost beyond recognition.

East warded off West, 40-35, in a slugfest that smashed records we can verify and probably established a few that we can’t.

Seventy-five total points are the most in the history of a game that — and in honor of the occasion, I’ll try to be charitable — has been anti-climatic and sedate over the years.

Five combined touchdown passes by the East’s Eric Theiss of Leavitt and Ronnie Turner of Lewiston aren’t merely a record. They’re a platinum, possibly unbreakable record.

In 20 previous Lobster Bowls, we’d seen 28 TD tosses. Total. By everybody. From Jon Christopher in 1990 to Cody Goddard in 2009.

Nobody had ever caught multiple TDs until Rashon Edgerton of Brunswick delivered two on Saturday.

Then there were the total yards: 570 by the East, alone; 977 in all.

“You play like it’s the playground,” said Turner, who was 14-for-22 with 190 yards and two scores through the air. “Like my mom’s calling me inside and I just want to make one more play.”

It wasn’t always that way, and on some level it’s easy to understand why.

Seven weeks past graduation day, nearly two months into working in the hot sun, staying up late and eating too much of the stuff our mothers warned us about, Lobster Bowl selects report to camp on a steamy Sunday in July.

They’re given six three-a-day sessions to exorcise the demons of old rivalries, become teammates, get back in game shape and learn a playbook.

Not many years ago, coaches would have told you the last step was the toughest. Game plans were so close to the vest that the offensive coordinator wound up with “student body right” tattooed on his chest at week’s end.

Now, glory be, we have the spread offense. And with it, a lot more reason for sunburned  spectators to pound down Gatorade and eschew the espresso once needed to stay awake.

“I’m not a big spread offense guy,” said East coach Bill County of Lewiston High School, “but the last two years running it in this game with Mike (Hathaway of Leavitt), I’ve realized it isn’t 100 plays. It’s five or six plays, run out of eight or nine different formations. You do the math and you come up with a pretty stout offense.”

The spread — run almost exclusively out of the shotgun, with backs and receivers sometimes indistinguishable from one another — has only come into vogue in the last half-dozen years.

High school coaches throughout the country became disciples of the University of Florida’s Urban Meyer and other practitioners of the spread. The trickle-down effect took a while, but now it has, um, spread to every nook and cranny of the state.

It’s especially potent in Maine because you don’t need 300-pound linemen or receivers that run a 4.2-second 40-yard dash to pull it off.

It requires quickness; different from speed, and more easily taught. It takes a quarterback who’s a little bit mobile, shrewd enough to sell a fake and gutsy enough to throw the ball into the flat.

“The playbook was very big, but also very simple,” said receiver Nolan Turner of Hampden Academy, who caught eight passes for 188 yards, including a 73-yard TD from Theiss. “With our receivers, this offense was made for points.”

Take these two quarterbacks, give them Lonnie Hackett of Bangor (28 carries, 163 yards) in the backfield, flank them with Turner, Edgerton and Cony’s Rick Orio and you might have the makings of the most explosive offense in Maine high school football history.

But I wonder.

Wonder how Christopher, Matt Gaudet, Bob Parisien, Brian Scott and other gifted passers of the past would have fared in a Lobster Bowl with the strings unattached.

Wonder what kind of numbers a state championship team of the 1960s or ’70s would have put up running 11 games out of the triple option instead of the I-formation.

I’m not one who believes today’s athletes are that much better than their dads and uncles. They’re just blessed enough to be playing in a game that has moved into the 21st century, under coaches who understand that it’s OK for their kids to have a little fun while they’re separating the snot from opponents’ noses.

“Being on an all-star team is a lot of fun, anyway, because everyone trusts everyone to make plays,” Theiss said.

It’s probably no coincidence that Maine football is bucking every nationwide trend, the number of schools playing it growing by a double-digit percentage in the last decade.

Soon, presumably by 2011, it will expand from three enrollment classifications to four.

Thank the spread. If it hasn’t saved high school football, it’s made it more inviting to play and to watch than ever.

And it has simply worked miracles for the Lobster Bowl, which was the most fun you could have watching football Saturday without a USB cord and a memory card.

Kalle Oakes is a staff columnist. His e-mail is [email protected]