LEWISTON – Tony Dube’s beard was disheveled, and you could tell he’d had a hard time growing it in the first place. Droplets of sweat formed on his head, caught the front of his hair and dropped to the ice below him.

His hands on his hips, Dube shook his head, whipped his hair back from his forehead and smiled.

“I am only human,” Dube said.

His teammates don’t think so, and neither do the Lewiston Blue Devils.

Dube made 32 saves, including 26 in the second and third periods, and four different Biddeford skaters scored to lift the Tigers to a 4-1 win over Lewiston in the Class A state championship game at the Androscoggin Bank Colisee on Saturday.

“He was an absolute warrior in there,” Biddeford coach Jamie Gagnon said. “What a way to go out for him.”

Dube added to his legend when word came out after the game of a guarantee he made to his teammates after the first period.

With the score tied 1-1, “He told us to get him one more and he’d take care of the rest,” Gagnon said. “He wasn’t kidding.”

“I do that when we’re behind and we come back to tie it up,” Dube said. “That’s how I feel I can play.”

Time after bedeviling time, Dube stood tall – through three consecutive Lewiston power plays in the second, through another 5-on-3 chance in the third, and, prehaps his biggest moment, a save on a Robbie Leeman short-handed breakaway early in the third period.

“It was definitely scary,” Dube said. “I took a risky move with the pokecheck. I’m not going to call it skill, I’m going to say I got lucky when I got the glove out there.”

“I thought that was it,” Lewiston coach Norm Gagne said. “We score that, there’s a whole change in the whole game right there.”

Lewiston had its chances, too. Ten times, the Devils played with at least one extra skater on the ice, and 10 times the Tigers’ penalty-kill shut them down.

“They bailed us out tonight,” Gagnon said. “All season we’d been talking about how important special teams are, and the focus was on the power play, not necessarily on the PK.”

And the game’s turning point? A short-handed goal by Biddeford captain Nick Reny.

“That was one of the best passes I’ve ever had hit me right in the stick,” Reny said of Brian Dumoulin’s outlet feed.

With the large home-town crowd behind them, the Blue Devils rode the momentum of an early power play to an early lead.

Six seconds after a Tyler Audie penalty ended and before the Tigers could send their fifth skater into the defensive zone, Matt Letourneau fired a wobbler past Dube into the top right corner of the net to put Lewiston on top 1-0.

Biddeford didn’t waste any time showing the sellout crowd why its power play was the best in the state this year.

On their first opportunity with a man advantage, the Tigers sent the puck past Cam Poussard on a blast from the left point by Trevor Fleurant.

Perhaps bigger for the Devils in the first, though, was the subsequent pair of penalty-kills, including more than a minute of 5-on-3 time, during which Biddeford is usually lethal.

“When we killed that 5-on-3, I thought we had the momentum going in our favor,” Gagne said.

In the third, after a flurry of penalties leading to several short power plays for both teams, Biddeford stuck the dagger into the Devils with a pair of late-third-period 4-on-4 goals, one each from Dumoulin and Cam Madore.

Dumoulin said after the game that it was likely his last for Biddeford.

“It’s looking like (the last game) right now,” Dumoulin said. “After having an undefeated season like this, it’s hard to top that next year. I’m going to miss this, all the fans, all of our supporters. It’s been great. I couldn;t ask for more.”

After two years’ worth of state championships, Biddeford no doubt feels the same.