LEWISTON — Asked how long they’ve been playing hockey together, Lewiston senior captains Kyle Morin and Griffin Wade smirked.

“Too long,” they said.

What’s no joke for two of the longest-tenured Blue Devils is the Class A boys’ hockey state championship drought that they haven’t yet been able to end.

Morin and Wade were on a Lewiston team that made it to the state championship game as freshmen, but the Blue Devils lost to Falmouth.

That was 2013. Lewiston’s last state title came in 2002. It’s been 14 years without a championship for a program that has 20. It’s the second-longest drought in the storied history of the team, behind a stretch between titles in 1942 and 1962 that included four years, during World War II, in which no champion was crowned.

Morin and Wade, and their five senior classmates, have spent their high school careers chasing a title that always seems promised.

Saturday’s state final against Scarborough presents one last chance to right that wrong.

“We really got to put everything into it,” Wade said. “We’ve got to work as a team. We can’t leave anything on the table. I don’t want to leave high school with regrets, knowing that I could have done more.”

Wade said he could have done more during his first three years, and that perhaps he took playing in the championship game as a freshman for granted, thinking he would be right back the next year. Now, as a captain, he’s making sure this year’s underclassmen don’t make that same mistake.

Morin said what’s made this year’s team special is that it has embraced being a family. The seniors are the role models, but there is talent in every class.

“We really want to emphasize the, ‘Look to your left, look to your right. Those are your brothers,'” Morin said. “It’s comforting to know that you’ll have guys that’ll do anything they can for you.”

Morin and Wade cracked the varsity lineup as freshman forwards. Goalie Sam Zashut, defensemen Jon Sturgis and Brady Cusson, and forwards Reid Pomerleau and Brendon Croteau, joined them at various times. Some have been playing together since they were in the Squirts tier as 6- and 7-year-olds.

The team’s title drought precedes even that, of which the seven seniors are well-aware.

“That’s a part of this program,” Lewiston coach Jamie Belleau said. “Everybody in that locker room, and anyone that’s part of our program knows we haven’t won one since 2002. I know that they’d like to lead this team to a state championship final and say that they’re the class that did it.”

It’s not that the Blue Devils haven’t had good teams. Even before this year’s seniors entered high school, Lewiston lost four straight state finals from 2005-08, and then again in 2011. After losing to Falmouth in 2013, the Blue Devils lost consecutive regional finals to rival St. Dom’s.

“We still had a pretty really good team, and we fell short, but we knew that we gave it everything we got and it just wasn’t our year to win,” Morin said. “We had some issues.”

The Blue Devils got that monkey off their back by defeating the Saints in this year’s regional final.

“It was great,” Wade said. “Coming up two years short, and in your senior year, final time playing St. Dom’s, coming out with a win, you’ll always remember that that was the last time you played them and it went in your favor.”

The final score looked lopsided — 5-1 in Lewiston’s favor — but Belleau said it’s taken a maturation of the team, notably the seniors, to be able to win that rivalry game that was just 2-1 after two periods.

“I’ll tell you that within the last month and a half, I’ve really seen a lot of maturity among the seniors, in particular our senior leaders, and I think it makes a big difference,” Belleau said.

The first sign that the team had to grow up and come together was a smack-in-the-face, 5-2 loss to Falmouth that halted a five-game, season-opening winning streak. The Blue Devils had beaten their first five opponents by a combined score of 41-3 before the Yachtsmen knocked them down a peg.

“It made us more humble,” said Sturgis, another captain. “We realized that we all had to work together as one to beat Falmouth or Scarborough or anybody, and it can’t be an individual player.”

Morin said there wasn’t much talking in the locker room after that loss, just a room full of players letting defeat sink in.

The maturity didn’t happen overnight, and neither did becoming a family, Sturgis said. The journey to end the drought, and to send the seniors off with a title, has helped the Blue Devils grow closer.

A state championship would be the fruits of the seniors’ labor.

“This senior class, in addition to being involved in a state championship game as freshmen — most of them — they were also part of a change of the culture here where we started working out in the summers, really taking some things off ice more seriously,” Belleau said.

He added, “I think it’s a culmination of those things: their experience on the ice, being part of the athletic program that’s really tried to change the culture of the expectations of their athletes in terms of work off the ice, and I think all of that’s coming together, along with the fact that we have a pretty skilled team.”

That culture change came as part of a realization that Lewiston and St. Dom’s — and their 44 combined state titles — had company at the top of the Class A food chain.

“You know other teams are going to be gunning for you,” Morin said. “And like coach says, when you wear a Lewiston jersey people are gunning for you no matter what. So any little advantage you can get, or give yourself, is going to help you in the long run.”

The Blue Devils will be well-prepared physically for Saturday’s state final. They know Scarborough well strategically, after playing to a pair of regular-season draws with the Red Storm. The only thing Lewiston’s seven seniors — and the rest of the roster — won’t be able to account for is the emotional side of the game.

“I’m sure they’re going to be emotional,” Belleau said. “But part of being a senior leader, and part of having that leadership and experience, is for them to understand both the magnitude of the game, but also understand it’s another game, and not let their emotions get the best of them.”

The emotions, Belleau said, can wait for the final horn. Morin, Wade, Sturgis, Zashut, Cusson, Pomerleau and Croteau have felt heartbreak already.

They don’t plan on feeling that again.

wkramlich@sunjournal.com

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