Kents Hill boys hockey coach Bill Desmarais, left, surveys the action during a Dec. 7 game against Thornton Academy. Joe Phelan/Kennebec Journal

Maine is fascinated (suspicious, even) with people or things “from away.” Most of the time, it’s a playful thing. We joke about catapulting somebody or something back across the Piscataqua River to New Hampshire. You can live in Maine for decades, but aren’t considered a Mainer if born outside state lines. It’s good for a chuckle.

Sometimes it manifests itself in really foolish or outright vile ways. We’re seeing that now in high school hockey, which will crown its state champions Saturday at Cross Insurance Arena in Portland. Specifically, we’re seeing it with Kents Hill, which will play Thornton Academy in the Class A final at 1 p.m.

Here’s the deal. For years, Kents Hill School, a private school just west of Augusta, has had varsity and junior varsity boys hockey teams. The varsity team competes in a league with other prep schools across New England. The JV team, on the other hand, played games wherever it found them, and during the last few years, it became harder and harder to schedule games that did not require hours of travel.

The solution was simple. Remove the junior varsity tag from the team and allow it to compete in Class A under the Maine Principals’ Association umbrella beginning this winter.

The MPA only stipulated that Kents Hill sever the link between its prep team, which is composed of recruited players, and its MPA team. The school obliged, with officials saying no recruited players would suit up for the MPA squad.

No longer could players bounce from one roster to the other. If a player was called up to the prep team, he could not go back to the MPA team.

Sounds reasonable, yes?

Ah, but this is Maine, and so many of those athletes pulling on the Kents Hill sweater are “from away.” So it’s not simple at all.

Right from the season’s onset, some around Maine high school hockey questioned the decision. Kents Hill ended up being good, but not dominant. The Huskies went 10-7-1 in the regular season, splitting a pair of games with each of the three teams that finished ahead of them in the Heal point standings: Falmouth, Lewiston and Thornton Academy.

Kents Hill is a good team. Is it a super-team sent to rain havoc on high school hockey as we know it? Of course not.

Bill Desmarais, Kents Hill’s coach, has heard the grumbling. He rightly dismisses it.

“I played high school hockey. I went to Lewiston. At the end of the day, it’s not about me. It’s not about the school. It’s about the kids, right? If you truly want to make this about the kids, I don’t understand what the issue is. I’ve got 10, 11 kids. I lost seven games this year. It’s not like we blew everybody out all year,” Desmarais said after Tuesday’s 4-2 win over Falmouth in the Class A semifinals. “It’s to develop kids and give them something to play for. How do you have a JV team that has nothing to play for? It’s hard to stay focused. It’s hard to motivate them. They knew all year they had the potential of playing on Saturday. Lucky for us, we’re here.”

But, but, but, some say, only two players on the Kents Hill roster are from Maine.

The correct response to that is … so what?

Are we going to start checking birth certificates before we let teams on the ice, or the court, or the field? That attitude is at best parochial, and at worst xenophobic. It’s “from away” doused in ghost pepper sauce.

Kents Hill boys hockey players warm up before start of a game against Thornton Academy in Readfield. Joe Phelan/Kennebec Journal

Kents Hill is located in Readfield, in the northwestern corner of Kennebec County. Don’t bother pulling out a gazetteer, we can all agree that falls squarely inside Maine’s borders. If not here, where would you have them play? To its credit, the MPA got this one right.

“Kents Hill is a member school in good standing. They are allowed to offer any activity that is sponsored by the MPA,” Mike Burnham, the MPA’s executive director, wrote in an email Wednesday. “Should it be discovered that they are not abiding by the rules that are in place, then it would become problematic, but we would work with them the same way that we do with every other member school.”

Piling on private schools is a time-honored tradition in Maine. Ask anyone involved with girls sports at Cheverus during the last few years about the kind of grumbling they’ve heard over their success in field hockey, basketball, hockey and softball. One coach at an opposing school asserted, incorrectly, that Maine is the only state in which public schools play private schools.

Ask anyone associated with Thornton Academy athletics over the last decade about the snide remarks they’ve had thrown their way. Oh, Kents Hill plays Thornton in the Class A final Saturday, which is sure to elicit some pouting that may trigger seismographs across the region.

Hyde School in Bath caught these criticisms in the past when it was a title contender in basketball, as did North Yarmouth Academy and Waynflete and Lee Academy and others. It doesn’t hold water any time it comes up. Are high school sports in Maine for the betterment of all students in Maine schools, an extension of the classroom and a chance to compete against your peers? Or are we going to slap an asterisk on that, *but only if you attend a public high school and grew up here.

Desmarais and his team have a state championship game to prepare for, against a strong Thornton Academy team with which they split a pair of regular-season games. Adding another good team to the mix is never a bad thing.

“We don’t recruit. We can’t,” he said. “All these kids have something to play for. At the end of the day, that’s what it’s about, right? They have the opportunity, on Saturday, to play for a state championship. These kids had nothing before that. They played 15, 20 games maybe, and the games really meant nothing. Now they’re buying in. They’re excited. They’re anxious. They want to be here.”

It should be a great game. Save your grumbling for something else.