AUGUSTA — The Cony boys basketball team needed a hot fourth quarter to beat Medomak Valley early in the season.

The Rams needed no such heroics this time.

Dakota Dearborn scored 24 points, Simon McCormick added 18 and 11 assists and the Rams finished a regular season sweep of their Class A North rival, routing the Panthers 91-59 Tuesday night.

Luke Briggs added 10 points for Cony (9-3), which defeated the Panthers (10-2) 91-78 in Waldoboro 12 days prior, but had to rally back from a four-point deficit midway through the fourth.

The Rams didn’t have to sweat much in this one, taking command of an 8-8 game with an 18-4 run, opening the third quarter on a 17-0 run to turn a 39-21 advantage into a 56-21 runaway, and coming away with a picture-perfect response to Saturday’s narrow 69-65 loss to Maranacook.

“You’ve got to put it behind you,” Dearborn said. “As soon as you go in the locker room after a game like that against Maranacook, you’ve got to let it go and move on. And we knew we had Medomak (next), which is a bigger one because they’re in our conference.”

Gabe Allaire scored 15 points, Patrick McKenney had nine and Parker Morrison added eight for the Panthers, whom coach Nick DePatsy said lost the toughness test even before Cony broke the game open in the third.

“They beat us in every facet of the game,” he said. “They out-rebounded us, they out-hustled us. They wanted it. … They out-toughed us, physically and mentally, the whole game.”

The first run was kickstarted by a Briggs 3-pointer with 3:33 left in the first, and was followed after by a McCormick jumper, an Isaac Gammon three and baskets by McCormick, Jamal Cariglia and Dearborn to make it 22-12 at the end of the first quarter.

After a Riley Geyer free throw, Cariglia knocked down a three to make it 26-12 with just under six minutes left in the second. While the Rams were hitting shots — they shot 15-of-30 from behind the arc — they were also winning on the glass, which was a battle they lost Saturday against the Black Bears.

“We challenged our guys to rebound better, because we’ve been getting killed on the glass all year,” Cony coach T.J. Maines said. “Riley Geyer (six points, 10 rebounds) was tremendous rebounding the ball, Jamal, Luke Briggs. Those three guys, that was the best rebounding we’ve had all season.”

In the third, Cony put the game out of reach with a dazzling shooting display. Briggs opened the stanza with a 3-pointer, and there were more to come as McCormick, Dearborn and Geyer all connected from downtown for 12 points in 1:16 of play.

Dearborn followed with a pair of free throws, a jumper and another free throw to cap the run. It was a complete reversal from how Cony opened the second half of its loss to Maranacook, which Maines said had become a point of emphasis for the team.

“That was huge,” Maines said. “We had been struggling with early third quarters, (in) the Maranacook game, at Medomak, where we had leads and gave it away in the third, so we really talked a lot yesterday about having a focus in the second half. It was great to see the kids respond to it.”

Dearborn scored 13 points in the third quarter alone, hitting everything from open threes to pull-up jumpers to runners through contact in the paint.

“He’s tough,” Maines said. “Dakota has a great nose for scoring. He scores at weird angles, and then he’s knocking down jump shots. … That helps his game because they have to extend to guard, and he can go by guys.”

The run through the iron of A North continues when Cony hosts 12-0 Hampden on Saturday after a Thursday game against Erskine. Maines knows if the team that showed up Tuesday comes to play at the end of the week, it’ll have a good shot.

“The way the kids came out and battled right from the very jump, (after) challenging them about rebounding, they did it,” he said. “The ball moved quicker, we cut harder. All of those things that we stressed and talked about, they did. Credit to our guys, they played their butts off.”

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