The team drove from its own 1-yard line and scored a TD. That team, Nicholas said, believed it could win. The other one wasn’t quite sure.

The Blue Devils aren’t quite the former, but Nicholas said they’re outgrowing the latter.

“Getting more to the belief,” he said.

It’s a step in the right direction, and the players notice it, too.

“What’s different this year is we’re actually expecting to make the playoffs,” senior receiver Desmond Jackson said. “Last year, we really weren’t supposed to be even close to making the playoffs. This year, we’re coming in, like, ‘All right, yeah, we made the playoffs, so we have a good chance to make it this year, too.’

“I just think that we’ll be able to win a couple games and find a way in there.”

Lewiston went 2-7 in 2015. That earned a postseason berth, but the Blue Devils traveled to Cheverus and lost in the Class A regional quarterfinals.

The 2015 team relied heavily on youth. Many sophomores became starters. Those sophomores have now become juniors with significant experience under their belts.

“There were times we had like seven sophomores on the field, which in football is unheard of,” Nicholas said. “So we’re a year older. We had a great offseason in the weight room, kids got bigger and stronger, and we’re just looking to get better than last year.”

Part of improving will be switching to the spread offense, which Nicholas said is better suited to the Blue Devils’ personnel, particularly new starting quarterback Brock Belanger.

“Our quarterback’s going to run, we’re going to run some option with him, we’re going to spread the field out,” Nicholas said.

Belanger was the JV quarterback in 2015, but he gained valuable varsity experience as a defensive starter. He said he also learned a lot from last year’s quarterback, Jared Rubin. Now he’s ready to take the reins.

“My goal is just, honestly, take charge on the field and be the captain on the field because I’m the quarterback this year,” Balanger said.

The spread also fits better with Lewiston’s abundance of athletes at skill positions, including Jackson, running back Roman Dennis, also a senior, and junior slot Garrett Boussard.

“We got a lot of guys that can handle the ball,” Nicholas said. “We’re going to try to spread the field out, spread the wealth out, so we’ll be tough to cover, at least that’s what we’re hoping for.”

While the Blue Devils are “getting more to the belief,” they aren’t quite there. They admit Lewiston football is a building project, in its second year under Nicholas. They hope to reach next phase in 2016.

“We really want to get a home playoff game. That would be really big,” Poussard said.

To achieve that, the Blue Devils need to finish third or fourth in Class A North, which isn’t easy in a region with Portland, Windham and Cheverus. Nicholas said those three teams probably will again grab the top three spots, so realistically, it’s fourth place that Lewiston is chasing. The Blue Devils, though, want to compete better against the class of A North than they have in the past.

“They learned last year in a lot of different ways,” Nicholas said. “So that this year, they’re more mature, that losing and letting the score go 14, 21, 28, 35 — they’ve learned that that’s because of us. That’s not because (they other team is) that good, it’s because we stopped tackling and stopped believing that we could stop this team.

“And I think they learned that last year, that we can’t let this happen to us anymore. We got to stay tough — bend but don’t break.”

lhorton@sunjournal.com

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