Here Comes Orono

In the Game of the Day, Orono survived against Hermon in overtime behind 18 points and 7 rebounds from Will Francis.

Eastern Maine Sports was there and caught up with him after the game.

As Francis said, this is a big Heal Points win for Orono, who have suddenly won 5 in a row.

The win doesn't actually do much for Orono, seeding-wise. It moves their odds for the 3 seed from 75% to 90.7%. The real impact is on Hermon. They entered the game with a 34% chance of getting the last bye in B North. That's down to 8.6% now.

Assuming the top 3 seeds are Caribou, Ellsworth, and Orono, B North now looks like this.

Yikes.

Elsewhere

Reiley Hedden's game-high 16 points led Telstar to an easy win over Wiscasset...Torie Tibbetts gave Hall-Dale 20 & 10 and the Bulldogs beat Madison by 21...Maddie Grimaldi's 16 and Avery Bessey's 15 helped Spruce Mountain run away from Mt. Abram and re-take 1st place in B South...Telstar survived a 14-4 fourth quarter by Wiscasset to win 33-32 for their second win of the year...Ava Ezell had 22 as Hodgdon beat East Grand...Madelyn Deprey dropped 23 on Houlton.

Update from yesterday: apparently the 13 3's by Buckfield's Trenton Haskell was actually a state record, eclipsing Taylor Schildroth's 12 back in 2017!

If you've been on Facebook, there's a good chance you've seen the video by now, but there's a better view of the Erskine fan getting ejected on Tuesday.

The feedback has been about what you'd expect from an incident like this--about 95% "what the hell?" and 5% "you guys don't understand, the refs were really bad!"

They weren't. It was a perfectly average night, ref-wise. They missed some calls that helped Erskine. They missed some calls that helped Medomak. They made a couple of bewildering calls. But even if it was the most atrocious job of officiating ever--Peter Well Hall of Famers, if you will--there's zero excuse for this kind of behavior. And this wasn't an isolated incident. They could have easily tossed several fans from the same area.

You know the parent that views every call against his kid's team as a personal affront? The parent that screams bloody murder about an out of bounds call in the first quarter like it's the final play of the game? Well there were like 5 of those guys in that section. The ref got fed up. And based on the performance on the way out the door, he made the right call. Because it was like that the whole game. And it's a shame because Erskine has a really good team and it was a really good game.

The kids deserve better.

There's some weird pushback that the guy volunteered to get ejected and that makes him a martyr or whatever. Even if that's true, his actions on the way out the door were reprehensible. Grow up.

There's also people mad at me for sharing it, but I firmly believe putting toxic behavior like this on blast is the best way to deal with it. So I'm going to keep doing it. Maybe don't make a fool of yourself at a high school basketball game if you don't want to embarrass your community.

I'll also keep sharing awesome game-winning shots (with permission, of course), like this one from the Capital Area League middle school championship game, where Maranacook and Cony are tied at 70 in overtime.

That's Maranacook 7th grader Liam Ferran finding 8th grader Carter Nelson for the game winner!

Leavitt's Wyatt Hathaway scored his 1,000th point for CMCC.

Here's your reminder to maybe not worry about the Celtics so much.

Let's go to Camden, where the Windjammers are hosting the defending A North champs from Cony.

Camden has won 6 of their last 8 games and with Tuesday's win over Hampden, they're in 3rd place in the Heal Points.

Cony had won 12 straight before running into the buzzsaw that is Lawrence on Tuesday.

Cony won the first matchup back in December by 7. Camden can't catch Cony for the 2 seed, but they can hold off Hampden for the 3 seed and stay out of Lawrence's side of the bracket.

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