PORTLAND – We’ve always known that Mountain Valley High School football players are gritty, relentless, lunchbucket types who habitually exceed the sum of their parts.

Well, the Falcons’ teachers and girlfriends must adore them, because they’re great listeners, too.

All week leading up to Saturday’s Class B championship at Fitzpatrick Stadium, undefeated and mostly unchallenged Mountain Valley absorbed all the trendy wisdom circulating about its opponent in the final.

Psssst, have you heard about Morse? They’ve been serving a giant bag of doughnuts to Eastern Maine since the second week of October.

And how about that Pine Tree Conference? It’s seven, eight, even nine teams deep. Nothing like the West. That division is full of expansion teams, you know.

Yeah, the Falcons know.

“To have to go onto the Internet sites and read that, we’re still pissed off,” said Mountain Valley coach Jim Aylward, his pent-up frustration bubbling over like a shaken soda. “I’m sick of listening to how great ‘B’ East is. I’m sick of hearing how bad our league is. We did to (Morse) what we did to everybody else this year.”

Rendered the second half irrelevant, in other words.

Mountain Valley breezed to its third Gold Ball in five years with a 52-7 flogging of Morse, carrying a chip on its shoulder pads the size of the Oxford, Cumberland and York counties it represented.

That final, like many of the watered-down scores from the Falcons’ spotless season, made reality sound more genteel than it was.

You could say it was an average day for Mountain Valley. Median score of its nine regular-season Campbell Conference conquests: 50-6.

This, against a team that rolled into the final on the crest of three consecutive road victories in the PTC playoffs.

Morse punctuated its nine-game winning streak by denying its opponents a whiff of the end zone for 18 consecutive quarters. The Shipbuilders sailed through the supposedly superior Winslow, Leavitt and Mount Desert Island in rapid-fire succession. Mountain Valley shook off gridiron newbies Falmouth and Cape Elizabeth.

The Falcons heard, digested and snarled at it all.

“We had plenty of bulletin board material,” said Mountain Valley assistant coach Steve LaPointe.

Then they fed Morse the one-two wallop of those 230-pound identical cousins, Justin Staires and Matt Laubauskas, from start to anti-climactic finish.

“We were just tired of hearing people say how good the East is and how the West is so weak. We went out today and proved that the West isn’t weak, and that the East isn’t as good as they thought,” said John Gorham, the senior wingback who’d be the featured runner for most other teams on either side of the imaginary line.

“Don’t get me wrong. I think some of the teams there are really, really good. Their team had some good players. No. 33 (J Cavanagh) made a lot of tackles. But we’ve got Justin and Matt. Justin’s been doing this since his freshman year, and Matt since his sophomore year.”

Staires rushed for 224 yards, piggybacking an 85-yard kick return touchdown less than three minutes earlier with a brilliant, 81-yard score on the final play of the first quarter.

“We must have had eight white jerseys touch him,” said Morse coach Jason Libby. “That’s a good coach. That’s experience over there. They wanted to take us out early. They kind of got us off our game.”

The Fitzpatrick Trophy semifinalist’s game of pinball down the home sideline made it 20-7.

Morse sputtered to numbers from there that made the Shipbuilders look like any old Fryeburg or Lake Region. Zero net yards passing. One total yard in the second half.

“We know that the West is definitely a strong conference. You look at Falmouth, Cape Elizabeth, York, you see all those good teams. People don’t realize how good they really are until they play us here,” Staires said. “The scoreboard might show that we beat teams by whatever, but they came out and played us hard. Every team that we played could have easily been a state championship contender.”

If they had Staires and Laubauskas in their camp, at least.

“I have great respect for their defense. But they hadn’t played us yet. We knew that,” Aylward said. “I’ve watched a lot of good athletes in Western Maine bounce off Matt Laubauskas and Justin Staires.”

Aylward, the only coach Mountain Valley has known, has seen former conference rivals Morse and Leavitt shifted to the East to account for population growth and the birth of new programs in the southern corridor. Former Class A powers Gardiner and Waterville blended into the PTC during that same stretch.

Perhaps the whisperers are right that Cape, Falmouth, Greely and Poland don’t evoke that same fear, yet. But while serving as the exception that proves the rule, maybe, just maybe, the Falcons earned a measure of respect for the new kids.

“We’re the best Class B team in the state,” Aylward said. “Period. End of discussion.”