The game plan has been rehearsed. The team dinner has been digested.

Travel arrangements have been made and revised.

All that is left for Oak Hill is to find a way to beat a formidable Bucksport team on Saturday and win its first state football championship in a generation.

Among those rooting on the Raiders at Portland’s Fitzpatrick Stadium will be members of the school’s last gold ball winning team — from 1982.

While it’s been 31 years, the ties between the teams are strong. A handful of players from the 1982 team have sons who will be suiting up Saturday.

“That makes me pretty proud,” said Gordon Strout, a star fullback/linebacker on the 1982 team whose freshman son, Matthew, plays special teams for the current Raiders. “We’ve chatted a bit about it, especially me and my wife (Debbie), about how cool it would be to have the dad on the first state championship team and have the son be on the next state championship team.”

Other former players coached the present-day Raiders in youth football. Still others have attended home games regularly, even though they have no direct connection to today’s team.

The Raiders’ recent run through the Western D playoffs has served as the backdrop for a reunion of sorts for the 1982 team, the success of which is commemorated by a large banner hanging from the visiting coaches’ tower on the football field.

Jeff Sturgis, the head football coach and athletic director of what was then a six-year-old high school, reminisced with his former players while wearing the state championship jacket they earned three decades ago.

“It was great for a relatively brand new school for the three communities to really bond together. It lifts your whole community,” Sturgis said. “The funny thing is, we didn’t have any trouble passing our (school) budgets for the next few years.”

Raiders vendetta

The three towns rallied around one of the most dominant teams ever to win a state title in Class D football, which the Maine Principals’ Association revived this year after 26 years in hibernation.

The Raiders went a perfect 10-0, outscoring their opponents in what was then known as the Downeast Conference, 384-99. Playing with a chip on their collective shoulders from a disappointing end to the 1981 season, they only trailed twice in 1982, 8-0 to Foxcroft Academy and 3-0 to Maranacook.

“We had a vendetta,” said Frank Curtis, a co-captain who played center and defensive end. “We had lost to Maranacook, 6-0, the season before. That was the hardest loss to swallow because we ended up 4-1 that year and they went 5-0 and won the title.”

Loaded with seniors who were brimming with confidence after winning a state baseball title the spring before, the Raiders would sing Queen’s “We Will Rock You” on the bus before games, and “We Are the Champions” on the way home.

“We had a close-knit team,” co-captain and quarterback Duane Myers said. “Our team played flag-football in Lisbon from grade school and we all played together right through high school.”

“We didn’t make many mistakes,” said Bill Martin, who played end on both sides of the ball. “If we got down, nobody seemed to be worried at all. It was so unfamiliar to us to be behind.”

Sturgis’ coaching staff included John Hersom — the former Edward Little star who would go on to lead Lawrence to a Class A title — who was fresh out of the University of Maine and working as a student-teacher. Bill Fairchild, who led Oak Hill to three state baseball championships and served as the school’s long-time athletic director, coached the offensive backfield.

That backfield was tough and talented. Running from wishbone and double-slot spread formations, the Raiders gained more than 3,000 yards with Strout at fullback and Andy Lebel and co-captain Chip Edwards at halfback. 

Strout rushed for 1,575 yards, averaging more than 10 yards per carry. Lebel rushed for 700 yards.

“Those guys would have had unbelievable statistics, but they didn’t play the fourth quarter of most of our ballgames,” Sturgis said. “Often times, I’d tell our starters, ‘You’ve got the first series of the third quarter and the you’re done,’ because we were in the 30s at halftime of most games.”

Strout was one of the top running backs in the state, regardless of class. He scored 24 touchdowns against defenses loaded up to stop him, which they never did.

“He was built like a fire plug. He was tough. He didn’t straight-arm people. He just ran over them,” Sturgis said. “He didn’t have blazing speed, but he had above average speed, so that when he broke into the open, he could beat most defensive backs down the field.”

“Every part of him screamed ‘muscle,'” said Don Therrien, who was a sophomore kick returner and safety. “He had the mentality that nothing was going to stop him. He was going fast and low and if he got through the line, there was no stopping him. The first game we played, I think it was against Telstar, he cracked a guy’s helmet in two.”

Curtis, Don Farrington, Vinny O’Brien, Jimmy Hall and Jeff White formed an offensive line that was unusually large for Class D. The ambidextrous Myers ran the offense with aplomb, even if he didn’t get to show off either of his strong throwing arms very often.

“The best athlete of the bunch,” Fairchild said of Myers. “He played quarterback left-handed and played shortstop for me right-handed. He was tough, he was quick. He could throw, but he didn’t have to.”

“Fairchild wanted me to get more into throwing both right and left-handed but I was more comfortable throwing a football left-handed and a baseball right-handed, oddly enough,” Myer said. “But if you know Fairchild, anything out of the ordinary, that was what he wanted.”

It was out of the ordinary for the Raiders to let an opponent hang around for long. In retrospect, some of them would have liked to experience the thrill of winning a close game, as this year’s team has done several times.

“My biggest problem was trying to keep from running up the score,” Sturgis said.

“It was nice to win, but it really would have been fun to play more,” Strout said. “A lot of games, we were done at halftime, probably a majority of the games. But it was good for the underclassmen, because a couple of years later a lot of those guys that were playing half of the varsity games in ’82, then went back to states in ’84 (where they lost to Dexter).”

On the rare occasion a drive stalled shy of the goal line, they had one of the top kickers in the state, Fern Langlois, to make sure they still got three points on the board.

Reflected glow

But the Raiders usually found the end zone. They scored 55 points again A.R. Gould, 54 against MCI and 44 against Boothbay. Sturgis told the Lewiston Daily Sun that only his own 4-3 defense, led by Curtis, Lebel at cornerback and Strout at linebacker, could stop his offense.

“We could have taken on a Class A team and we could have blown them out of the water,” boasted Therrien, whose son, Dalton, is a sophomore safety and kick returner this year.

Their only competition in Class D came from Foxcroft, which twice held them to a season-low 24 points, and even led the Raiders, 8-7, in the third quarter of their first meeting.

“We went up there to play them during the regular season, and right from the first play all you could hear was helmets and shoulder pads cracking,” Curtis said. “It was like, ‘Oh my God. These guys like to hit as much as us.'”

The Raiders did more of the hitting and they came from behind to beat the Ponies, 24-8.

They earned the South Division championship after mauling Maranacook, the defending champ, 41-3, behind a 13-carry, 263-yard day by Strout. Another battle with Foxcroft, the Downeast North champion, loomed in the state title game.

Oak Hill hosted the championship and parking overflowed onto nearby Route 126. Anticipating that Foxcroft would focus on slowing down Strout, the Raiders used their star as a decoy and gave the ball to Lebel, whose 14-yard touchdown on their first possession put them in front for good.

“I think their coach might have even said that they weren’t going to let Strout beat them, so they had some guys keying on me, which is fine because it opened things up for Andy and he took advantage of it,” said Strout, who still managed to run for 125 yards. “He got top billing that week.”

Lebel rushed for 144 yards and three touchdowns and Rick Bourgoin led the defense with two interceptions as the Raiders cruised to a 28-6 win.

The championship season was a topic of dinner conversations all over RSU 4 long before the 2013 team’s magical playoff run. But those who have been telling tales to their sons for all of these years are ready for the new generation to flip the script.

“If they win Saturday, I promised my son I would never say 1982 again,” Therrien said. “He can talk about 2013 all he wants.”

Those who don’t have direct ties to that 1982 team still got a chance to learn about its legacy when current coach Stacen Doucette invited Sturgis to talk with the team at practice.

“(Doucette) has been very gracious … trying to include us old-timers in the reflected glow of what they’ve done,” Sturgis said. “It’s been a lot of fun, and we’re going to have a lot of fun on Saturday.”

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