AA South Clarity? Not So Much.

In the Game of the Day, Gorham turned on the jets in the 4th quarter to extend a close game into a comfortable 10-point win over South Portland.

The win moves the Rams into a virtual 3-way tie in the Heal Points for seeds 2-4 with SoPo and Bonny Eagle (who lost to Sanford, giving them some much-needed separation from Massabesic and the 8 seed).

Except...

The Thornton Academy boys lost to Portland! Their first loss of the season! Only, Portland was favored by 8.5 in the matchup, so all that really does is clean up some things around the edges.

In the Tournament Odds, TA drops from 88.8% allll the way down to 82.4% for the 1 seed and SoPo actually improves from 6.9% to 7.4%. If you're South Portland, this was the break you needed.

The big winner here is Gorham (and people who love to obsess about Heal Points) as they go from being the little brother in this race for 2-4 to a full-fledged competitor.

This could get fun down the stretch.

Also...

Lizzy Gruber has been the front-runner for Miss Basketball since, oh, Christmas of her freshman year, but she may have ended the race last night with a dominant 39/18 performance that saw her grab her 1,000th rebound as Gardiner clinched a playoff berth. She's nearly at 1,000 points as well, so expect that soon.

GNG had a big night as the girls knocked off previously-unbeaten Brunswick and then the boys went ahead and beat the Dragons in OT. Nate Hebert (who else?) had a 3 at the buzzer to force OT.....Also falling from the ranks of the unbeaten were the OOB boys, who lost to Maranacook. Keagan McClure had 29. I guess it runs in the family....Shane Feeney rallied Machias past Bangor Christian.

The Brunswick girls obviously didn't cover (neither did Gardiner), so we're down to 5 teams that are unbeaten both on the floor and Against the Spread: Southern Aroostook boys, Spruce Mountain girls, Hall-Dale girls, Kents Hill girls, and NYA girls. Who will be the last team standing?

The football and soccer classification plans have been leaked and it looks like a repeat of basketball, except there's word of a 6 team region in football. Yikes.

Finally, I spent an hour last night at Hannaford trying to get a prescription to paxlovid (much thanks to the pharmacy workers) and then drugged up on Theraflu watching Hoosiers and the scoreboard was still fully reported, so I think we can call the scoreboard experiment a success.

I'm going to pull a little bit of an audible here.

The Game of the Day should be the Dirigo/Carrabec boys game, but the spread there is 18.5, so...no.

The Hodgdon girls are still rolling after their win over Southern Aroostook. They're 9-0 on the year now and neck-and-neck with Dexter, but the Tournament Odds tell a different story, giving Dexter a commanding lead for the 1 seed. They'll need every Heal Point they can get and it starts tonight with Fort Kent.

Fort Kent almost certainly can't get a bye to Bangor (1.2%) so their focus will be on securing a home play-in game. They're currently sitting in the 7 spot in the Tourney Odds, but could realistically go as high as 5 or as low as 12.

Hodgdon won the first one by 3 at home.

The rest of today's schedule is after the jump.