Senior Night festivities at MacKenzie Gymnasium in Old Town before Wednesday’s Class B North boys basketball game between the Coyotes and neighboring Old Town were brief, with just three senior players honored between the two teams combined.
But while the pregame ceremony undoubtedly had a bittersweet quality for Kyle Paradis and Isaac Hayes of Old Town and Javier Alicea-Santiago of Orono, the small senior classes mean both the present and immediate future of the rival teams look bright.
Orono completed the season sweep of its two games against Old Town, scoring the game’s last six points for a 43-41 victory.
The sophomore-laden Red Riots concluded their regular-season schedule with a 15-3 record that should secure second place in the division behind undefeated Ellsworth (18-0).
“I feel great about this group and I would feel great regardless of whether we won tonight because of how hard they’ve worked and how far we’ve come,” Orono coach Ed Kohtala said. “They’re a young team and there are things they don’t know, but the nice thing about that is their heads don’t get full of those things they might think they know had they been through them two or three times.”
Junior-heavy Old Town (12-5) also is poised for a top-four finish in Class B North despite taking a two-game losing streak into its regular-season finale against Houlton on Thursday.
“I’m confident we’re headed in the right direction after the Bucksport game [a 60-54 road loss last Saturday],” Old Town coach Garret Libby said. “I think that was a bit of a wake-up call for us. We’ve had a couple of good practices since then and did a lot of good things [against Orono] that we can build off, so if we can keep our heads after a tough loss and step into the gym and hopefully grab a W [against Houlton] I think we’ll move on just fine.”
Wednesday’s battle between the Coyotes and Red Riots checked off all the boxes of a late-season rivalry game save for the fact the crowd was limited as the bleachers on one side of the gymnasium were closed.
But the scene on the court still was intense during a contest in which both offenses struggled to maintain their offensive rhythm.
“Defense and rebounding were what gave us a chance, because offensively we never quite clicked,” Kohtala said. “Old Town had great intensity defensively from the very beginning. They got us back on our heels and that never really changed.”
Orono slowed Old Town’s offense by switching from its usual man-to-man defense to a 2-3 zone for much of the night. That forced the Coyotes to the perimeter where they made seven 3-pointers compared to just eight 2-pointers during the game.
“We didn’t have one of our best shooting nights and their zone slowed things up for us, which changed the game a little because we’re usually in a higher-scoring game,” Libby said. “We’ve got to do better at finding good looks against it.”
Old Town scored its final 2-pointer on a drive by Carson Ellis with 3:46 remaining to take a 41-37 lead before Orono sophomore guard Pierce Walston scored six of his game-high 14 points to close out the game.
Walston, the reigning Big East Conference player of the week, scored after grabbing an offensive rebound to narrow Orono’s deficit to two points.
He then used some craftiness to tie the game, bouncing an inbounding pass from the baseline off the back of a Coyotes defender and making two free throws with 1:20 left after being fouled when he gained possession of the loose ball.
Old Town tried to set up for a go-ahead basket when Walston tipped the ball away from a dribbler and took a pass from Alicea-Santiago in for the go-ahead layup with 1:05 to go.
Another tip-away gave Orono a chance to extend the lead, but the Red Riots came up empty on two free throws with 8.1 seconds left.
That gave Old Town one final chance to tie or take the lead, but Orono freshman Will Francis blocked a shot by Paradis as time expired.
“That’s the kind of intensity in a game — and I believe that Old Town probably would say the same thing — that in getting ready for tournament time is what you want,” Kohtala said. “Clearly it could have gone either way, we just happened to get a break or two late.”
