Hawks Take Flight

Let's start at Hampden Academy for the B North Regional Finals.

In the boys game, John Bapst and Medomak Valley (playing in their first-ever Regional Final, boys or girls) traded goals in an evenly-matched game. With a 2-1 lead late, Medomak was pressing for an equalizer, but Bapst picked up a penalty after a counter and Oscar Martinez punched this in for insurance.

In the girls game, Hermon and Medomak played the highest-scoring 0-0 half I've seen in a while. Both teams had chances. The Panthers hit the crossbar and the Hawks had a couple shots juuuust miss wide right.

Hermon's Payton Guerette did manage to kick this field goal.

She had to be helped off in the first half with what appeared to be a knee injury a few minutes after this, but she returned and absolutely DOMINATED the second half. Hermon scored 3 goals in the first 10 minutes, Medomak hit the crossbar again, this time from the 40 yard line, and Natalie Tardie had a hat trick, but the story was Guerette. She took over the game without scoring a goal as Hermon turned a 0-0 halftime score into a 5-1 rout.

Oh, and she's a freshman. Thankfully there was no chant.

There will be no repeat in Class C boys.

Skowhegan's field hockey program is stuff of legend. They came into this season having won 22 consecutive Regional Titles. Twenty two in a row. Without a doubt the most mind boggling record in Maine High School sports.

An entire generation of girls only knows winning Regional Titles.

Enter Brewer.

The Witches end the most impressive run in state history and will take on Edward Little for a Gold Ball.

If you read this newsletter, then you already know Simon Allen can hoop, but it's still fun to see the Cameron Crazies find out.

An update on the Model's performance in the playoffs:

Football: 18-1 (94.7%)
Boys Soccer: 65-16 (80.2%)
Girls Soccer: 66-13 (83.5%)
Field Hockey: 40-4 (90.9%)

Gold Ball Odds are updated.

Before the soccer playoffs started, I recorded a pair of "Let's pick a Cinderella!" podcasts. The premise is simple: I throw out the team the Model has picked as the favorite and attempt to read the tea leaves and figure out who might win the region if the favorite doesn't.

So how did I do?

Pretty good.

Of the 20 regions, the Model got 11 right. I guessed correctly on 6 of the remaining 9. That left 3 and 1 of them (Greely) was essentially a co-favorite, so I didn't let myself pick them.

If you want to listen, you can find the podcasts in the feed.

There's no podcast this week, due to a scheduling snafu.

Game of the Day

The vast majority of the football playoffs are tonight (there's 2 games on Saturday).

Let's go to 8-Man Large School where, uh, things are close.

(There's no regions in this class, so the Regional Final is the Gold Ball game, hence the X)

That truly is the definition of a toss-up. I couldn't even do a Cinderella pod here because there's no favorite, just a 4-way who the hell knows?

These semi-finals are the top 2 games in the Stax Index, so you can't go wrong either way and it nicely broke geographically so the two southern teams are playing each other and the two Midcoast teams are playing each other, although some would argue Mt. Ararat is slightly outside of the Midcoast.

I'll be at Camden/Mt. Ararat because when the Game of the Day is less than an hour from my house, I gotta be there. Come say hi.

NFHS has this game, so if you want to watch it, them's the breaks. But! If you do sign up for NFHS, use this affiliate link. It means they get less money. You might need it for basketball season anyway.

The Model's picks for all of today's games are after the jump.