Last week, Kalle Oakes listed the top five games he’s witnessed as a fan and a journalist. This week, Randy Whitehouse lists his top five:

5. Madison 28, Lake Region 15, 1982 Class C Championship. Oakes has this as his No. 5, too, but he got the year wrong, and you can’t trust a guy who doesn’t remember when he saw it. I’m here to give the Lake Region version. Yes, Madison’s Bob Wilder was one of the first great high school passers in the state. But my Lakers weren’t exactly “Ground and Pound” themselves. They had Dan Proctor slinging the ball to tight end (and current Gorham coach) Dave Kilborn, who set a number of national receiving records for tight ends during his high school career. The Lakers actually kept Wilder in check in the first half and held a 15-8 lead in the third quarter before Wilder went wild to lead the Bulldogs to victory in a dominant fourth quarter.

4. Edward Little 56, Oxford Hills 48, 5 OT, Oct. 3, 2009. The beauty of high school sports is you don’t need a playoff game, or two playoff-caliber teams, to play a game with more dramatic mood swings than a diabetic dietitian at an ice cream social. The Red Eddies were 0-4, the Vikings 1-3, and the game started out as sloppy as Don Gouin Field on a cold, rainy homecoming Saturday afternoon. It was 8-6, Vikings, to start the fourth quarter. The teams exchanged touchdowns in the final 1:01, with Oxford Hills tying it on Matt Verrier’s desperation heave to Eli Dolloff in the end zone with no time left (and EL forcing overtime by blocking the PAT). EL QB Teven Colon (154 yards and four TDs rushing, two TDs passing) and teammate Brandon Vye traded touchdowns with the Vikings’ Jake Hall (199 yards rushing and five TDs) throughout the extra sessions, the pressure mounting with every score and two-point conversion. In the fifth overtime, Colon and Vye hooked up on a 10-yard screen pass to go ahead, then Avery Jackson pounced on a pitch that slipped through Hall’s fingers to clinch it. Judging by their celebration, you would have thought the Eddies won the Pine Tree Conference, and they probably felt like they did.

3. Bangor 28, Lewiston 25, 2010 Eastern Class A Championship. Oakes and I watched this one together, which is a good thing because I needed someone to reassure me I was actually seeing what I thought I was seeing when Lewiston decided to go for it on fourth-and-inches at its own 10 while trying to protect a 25-20 lead with a little over two minutes left. I was convinced the Devils were going to try to draw the Rams offsides again (they had tried, unsuccessfully, before a time out). When they snapped the ball, my heart started pounding, and didn’t stop until the Newport exit on the ride home. As my colleague pointed out, this was a great game even before that fateful call.

2. Jay 14, Livermore Falls 13, 2004 Western Class C Championship. Not the last great game of the late, great rivalry, but perhaps the rivalry at its peak. With Jay trailing 13-6 with two minutes left, quarterback Justin Wells led the Tigers on an 11-play, 69-yard drive as the bipartisan throng at Taglienti Field held it breath with every play. His touchdown pass to Andrew Deering merely gave the Tigers one play to tie or win it. Jay coach Mark Bonnevie decided to go for the win, and Wells found Deering again in the end zone. One side of Taglienti Field went bonkers, the other side stood shocked into silence.

1. Edward Little 14, Lewiston 13 (2OT), 2002 Eastern A Championship. I can count the number of high school games I’ve seen end with a game-winning field goal on one hand, but that isn’t why this is the tops. First, this game wasn’t even supposed to happen. The Red Eddies were the fifth seed, the Blue Devils the sixth, heading into the playoffs. Yet they wrote one of the most compelling chapters in their ancient rivalry, with 5,000 fans at Walton Field hanging on every snap on a freezing cold Saturday afternoon. Adding a touch of the bizarre to the drama, the power went out at halftime (poor Bim Gibson) because a pizza concession overloaded the circuits. By the time Will Claxton’s 17-yard field goal split the uprights (and, if I recall correctly, landed on the roof of the school), everyone’s circuits were fried.