The wind whipping across the open field forced the visiting Saints to wrap towels around their necks. Their thin, leather helmets did nothing to insulate their heads from the biting, bitter cold.

On the kind of night when having a dripping nose meant icicles would tickle your upper lip, St. Dominic’s marched into Dixfield and won a regular-season meeting, 4-1.

“They couldn’t wait to get back inside,” Dixfield skater Tim Hanson recalled.

“We had parkas, the old football parkas,” St. Dom’s forward Richard Maheux remembered. “We’d all huddle under the parkas, and people would throw snowballs at us.”

Dixfield won just four games during regular-season play, and was a heavy underdog against Lewiston in the state semifinals.

But the Dixies won, 5-4, on a Jim Robinson slapshot from the blue line.

“I think I remember that one more,” Hanson said. “We got more comfortable with the arena, and (going into the St. Dom’s game), we didn’t have anything to lose.”

The rematch against St. Dom’s loomed. The Saints dispatched Waterville 5-2 in the other semifinal, setting up a showdown at Bowdoin College. This time, the game was inside. This time, a win would crown St. Dom’s the Maine state champion for the 12th consecutive season.

But, in front of an estimated crowd of 2,000, the Saints lost their halos.

“The game of hockey has a funny way of turning things around, doesn’t it?” former coach Andy Gagne said. Gagne was the Saints’ assistant that season under head coach Raymond Marcotte.

Fifty years later, it’s still considered by many in the hockey community to be the single greatest upset in the sport’s long history in Maine.

“They were kings,” Hanson said. “We’d never planned on beating St. Dom’s.”

“Miracles do happen,” Dixfield skater Jimmy Gill added. “It really was a miracle.”

Roughing it

The fact that Dixfield won a state title was shocking. The fact that the hockey program in this tiny river community existed at all was nothing short of a miracle.

“I’m surprised any of us even wanted to play,” Hanson said.

“We didn’t have anything else, so we played hockey,” fellow Dixfield skater Jimmy Gill remembered. “We had a few rivers and ponds, and as kids we kept them scraped off.”

There were no locker rooms at the outdoor rink. Visiting teams changed in the school’s industrial shop, while the home team changed in the basement.

There was a warming shed a short distance from the playing surface, with a small path of ice between the two.

In addition to playing hockey, Dixfield’s 13 team members also learned how to take care of the rink. The players had to clean the rink before practice, and spent nights flooding the surface to keep it playable.

“When we finally got to the point where we could have ice, we’d work in shifts,” Gill said. “Some of us would walk four or five miles to the rink, flood it, and the next shift would come in. We’d haul the hoses out of the school, hook them up, flood it, drain the hoses and haul them back in for the next shift.”

During games, fans stood on the snow banks surrounding the rink. They would sweep the ice off between periods, while the players warmed up in the school.

There was no scoreboard, and no red lights to flicker behind the goaltenders when they let the puck by. Instead, a fan would be the goal judge, raising his or her hand when a puck crossed the line.

“Sometimes they stood on the ice, and sometimes they stood in the snowbank,” Hanson said. “We didn’t have the room behind the nets that they have these days.”

Dynasty, interrupted

The Saints, meanwhile, had their own arena. In 1958, it was brand new, after a fire destroyed their first building in 1956.

“Each of these teams played in indoor arenas,” Hanson said. “We were the only ones playing outside.”

St. Dominic High School opened its doors in the early-1940s, and graduated its first class in 1945.

A hockey dynasty was born.

From 1947 to 1957 inclusive, the Saints were the state’s best. They quickly caught up to – and surpassed – cross-town rival Lewiston High School, which had won four state championships through 1942, when World War II forced schools to cancel the tournament.

When things started back up in 1947, St. Dom’s took over.

“All the kids who played hockey came to St. Dom’s,” Gagne said. “The other schools didn’t have such good teams, and naturally we were better than they were.”

The Saints went on to the New England tournament as Maine champions in each of their championship years.

On that late winter day in 1958, there was no reason to suspect anything would be any different.

Overconfident vs. Nothing to lose

St. Dom’s broke coaching rule No. 1 that year – the team underestimated an opponent.

“They were so outmatched, we should have walked,” Maheux said. “From what I remember, several guys were flying solo down the ice, coming close but not really. There was a lack of cohesion.”

“The attitude was, ‘No way can we lose,'” Gagne said. “As it turned out, the game of hockey has a way of turning things around.”

Dixfield, meanwhile, was loose.

“We had nothing to lose at all,” Gill said. “We had just beaten Lewiston in the semifinal, so we already felt great.”

Even indoors at Bowdoin College, Dixfield had a mental edge.

“We got ahead, we played hard, and we had a lot of lucky breaks,” Gill said. “We didn’t have a few, we had a lot.”

Legacies defined

To many people, the loss to Dixfield is a two-minute minor in an otherwise flawless game plan. The Saints put together one of the most dominant pair of decades in high school hockey history. Following the 1958 season, they won seven of the next nine state titles, and captured 18 state championships in their first 21 years.

Since 1967, when that run ended, St. Dom’s has earned six more state championship trophies, the most recent coming back-to-back in 1999 and 2000.

Lewiston High School caught up and now has 20. Waterville has 19.

Dixfield has one.

The Dixies reveled in their win for a few years, and even won a regular-season title in 1962.

But in 1965, the school introduced basketball as a varsity sport. Three years later, the hockey team disbanded.

Several years ago, Hanson received a phone call from the school’s janitor.

“I felt as if I had been gut-shot,” Hanson said. “(He) told me he was throwing out our only championship hockey trophy. What I learned from my high school hockey days has served me well throughout my life, and they just wanted to assign us to the ashes of history.”

Hanson saved the trophy, and today, it is prominently displayed in the library.

“They were going to toss it out, I couldn’t believe it,” Hanson said.

St. Dom’s has many trophies on display, scattered about a less-than-10-year-old high school which now sits in Auburn, across the river. The hockey team still skates in what is now the Androscoggin Bank Colisee, where a banner lists each of its 24 state championships.

Thanks to 13 players from Dixfield, 1958 is conspicuously missing from that list.