DIXFIELD — It’s the first Friday in March. Dirigo High School must be getting ready for a Class C basketball championship game.

This morning, the Cougars will skip school, inspiring the first of many raucous howls this weekend, and board a bus bound for Bangor Auditorium.

Together, a team will step onto the elevated floor under the often-leaky, inverted triangle of a roof. They’ll learn about strange echoes and dead spots and elusive sight lines. They’ll practice. Then they’ll retrace their tire tracks and endure a fitful night’s sleep before doing it all again Saturday for a captive audience of thousands with a shimmering prize at stake.

It’s a ritual that began before many of the boys were born. When their coach, Rebecca Fletcher, wore the same confident, never-changing expression on her face as a point guard.

When Dirigo meets Lee Academy for the boys’ title at 8:45 p.m. Saturday, it marks the 14th time in 17 winters that a team from this community high school of 331 students has appeared in one of the two games with a Class C Gold Ball in the balance.

Welcome to Title Town, the Maine hoop edition.

“It’s pretty much just a basketball town,” senior Arik Fenstermacher said. “It’s kind of expected. If Dirigo isn’t in the playoffs, there’s something wrong. It’s like it’s not worth it if we haven’t gotten to the state game.”

Dirigo has won three consecutive Western Maine boys’ championships, becoming only the third school to achieve the distinction. This year’s Cougars reached that pinnacle with their third different coach in as many seasons and an all-new starting five.

Prior to that revival, anyone playing a word-association game with Dirigo High School would have coughed up one answer: Girls’ basketball. The Cougars won a record, unlikely-to-be-duplicated 11 straight regional titles from 1995 to 2005.

Beginning with Fletcher’s ’96 team, the Dirigo girls gathered six Class C state championships with Coach Gavin Kane at the helm.

“Basketball is probably the top sport here,” said senior Spencer Ross, who already has celebrated state titles in football and baseball. “When basketball season comes around, everybody’s ready. The community is so involved.”

The evidence appeared in the flesh Thursday night at DeFoe Gymnasium.

While the Cougars went through their final full practice of the season, a team of two seniors, seven juniors, four sophomores and two freshmen had company. Postgraduates Tyler Chiasson and Eric Bolduc, stars on last year’s Western Maine title team, went through the rigors with their successors at full speed.

“Guys come back. We always came back. Even when I was in college playing, I came back when I was on break whenever I had a chance. It feels like it’s tradition here,” Fletcher said. “When you’re part of our program, you’re welcome back any time. It’s only going to help us. We had an alumni scrimmage. It actually was brutal. It was pretty early, but it still was brutal. It was great competition.”

Even when all colleges are in session and the current Dirigo boys are on their own, they don’t need to look far to feel dwarfed by tradition.

Mounted along the gym wall between the two benches are retired jerseys by the half-dozen and a banner boasting of 1,000-point scorers. Names and numbers pay homage to departed Dirigo stars of each gender: Doug Clark, the late Rick Dunlay, Tom Knight, Fletcher, Alexa Kaubris, Lyndsay Clark, Tara Gagnon.

The list could go on.

Today’s stars are still finding their niche in Dirigo history. Ross, Fenstermacher and Cody St. Germain are three of the few veterans on a new-look team in 2011.

If any current player hasn’t participated in a state final, however, he’s surely attended one. Or in most cases, many of them, one in almost every year of his life.

Fenstermacher is the youngest of five children. Sisters Angela and Abigail were mainstays for Kane’s girls’ teams. Brother Aaron was a teammate of Knight, Chiasson and Bolduc on the squad that lost to Calais by one point in the ’09 final at Bangor.

“We know what’s expected,” Fenstermacher said. “It’s Dirigo basketball. I’d have to say it’s the town’s favorite sport. Just look around at all these banners and all the years on them.”

Josh Turbide’s sister, Nicole, and cousin Brooke Weston each played in a Class C girls’ final all four years of high school.

And yes, anyone who tells you there’s no added pride to being part of the boys’ resurgence is lying.

Walk away from the banners, push back the heavy doors and breeze past the row of Gold Balls in the hallway trophy case, and the sudden revelation is that most of them were won by players wearing pony tails and eye shadow.

Dirigo’s last boys’ state titles came back-to-back in 1982 and ’83.

“When I was in eighth grade, Dirigo boys started to turn around,” said Turbide, now a junior. “I knew coming up we could have a few good years. It helped having some success.”

Much of the credit for the putting the boys back on the map goes to Kane, winner of more than 400 high school games and now an assistant coach with the University of Maine women’s program.

Kane guided the boys’ program for four seasons, the first two in a dual role as girls’ coach. His legendary tenure ended after the defeat in the 2009 state final.

“When Coach Kane took over the program, I thought, ‘Great. We’re going to win a lot,’ ” Fenstermacher said.

“That brought our two programs together, because it didn’t always used to be like that,” Fletcher said. “Sometimes it was a little different if there were siblings on each team. But as far as genuinely supporting each program and wanting each other to do well, that really changed when he had both programs.”

Dave Gerrish led the Cougars to last year’s final before resigning due to work commitments.

That ushered in Fletcher, a longtime Kane assistant and now the first woman to coach a boys’ team to a regional championship.

“It’s someone all of us grew up with,” Fenstermacher said.

Dirigo’s latest team also grew up with that sensation of winning and the expectations it breeds.

One of the first people responsible for bringing it back, Fletcher now is the one in charge of making sure the Cougars feel it as a fire in their belly, not as a weight on their shoulders.

“You can’t take any of these opportunities and look at them as pressure. If you make pressure in your head, you have a problem,” Fletcher said. “I don’t think the tradition of the girls impacts them necessarily unless they’re trying to match it or something like that. If anything, (the pressure they feel is) that the school has been there the last three years. They want to get another one and get over the hump.”

Sounds like business as usual.

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