View 5 photos

LEWISTON — Although he was aware of the stakes, it still took a moment for Wesley Crouse to soak in the fact that the championship streak he helped end Wednesday began before he was alive.

No one besides the Waynflete Flyers had won a Class C boys tennis state title since June 2007, 10 months before Crouse, a junior at Orono High, was born. On Wednesday, though, Crouse and his teammates had the honor of snapping Waynflete’s streak of 16 championships with a 3-2 victory at Bates College.

“It’s crazy to think about how this streak has been going since before I was born,” said Crouse, who, along with Ben Sidelko, won the clincher at second doubles. “We were here last year, and obviously we couldn’t do it last year, but we’re back this year with a new group, and we got the job done.”

Orono’s victory snaps the longest state championship streak in any Maine high school sport. The last Class C champion before Waynflete’s streak was North Yarmouth Academy, which defeated George Stevens Academy 18 years ago.

The Maranacook girls also won a state championship Wednesday, defeating Piscataquis, 5-0. It’s the second state title in three years for the Black Bears, who took down the Pirates without losing a set.

Al-Kahder Wise and Dylan Dupuis gave the Orono (16-0) boys a 1-0 lead with a victory at No. 2 doubles, defeating Waynflete’s Griffin Hissong and Luka Duzevik. Henry Buetens then brought the Red Riots within one win of history by defeating Leo Woolf.

“I can always tell when (co-coach Siera Tibbetts) is stressed because she’s eating, and she wasn’t eating yet,” joked Orono co-coach Zach Arnold. “I’ve also seen over the years you can win the first set, and then the second flips the other way. … I wasn’t counting any chickens yet.”

Crouse and Sidelko won their opening set, 6-2, against Jonah Rollins and Silas Wellenius and led 5-4 in the second set. The Waynflete duo, though, rallied to win 7-5 and even the match.

Instead of succumbing to lost momentum, Sidelko and Crouse regained their form. The two played their best tennis in the third set, winning 6-0 to clinch the first boys tennis state championship in Orono history.

“At the end of the second set, we were definitely on the decline, but in the very last game, we gained a little bit of that momentum back,” Crouse said. “At the coaches meeting, we talked about that and thought about how we could keep that momentum going, and we just powered through the third set.”

After beating Orono 3-2 in the state final two years ago, Waynflete swept the Red Riots in last year’s rematch without losing a set. Bringing back five rising seniors among its top-seven players, Orono was determined to fight its way back to a stage where it knew the Flyers would be waiting.

“I felt coming into it this year that the chance was there, but it’s just always tough to come down here against a team like Waynflete,” Arnold said. “They’re so great; we’ve tried to find parallels up north, and we played some strong teams up there in exhibitions that (were) helpful.”

Waynflete’s Jeff Adey defeated Orono’s Nick Agrawal 6-1, 6-1 at No. 1 singles, and Theo Demetriou topped Bergen Soderberg 6-2, 4-6, 6-2 at second singles. It was just the second defeat in 22 state championship matches for Waynflete (12-4).

In the girls final, Maranacook (15-1) quickly took a lead as Lydia Garofalo and Julia Thaller both posted 6-0, 6-1 victories over Khloe Kimball and Gabriella Koscielny at second and third singles, respectively. Leah Hildebrandt and Ava Candage then beat Karrigan Wilson and Bella Buehne at first doubles, sealing the title.

Molly Woodford and Lilly Brosey sweetened the victory for Maranacook with a 6-3, 6-4 win over Audrey Chadbourne and Ava Goulette. The last point went to Claire Dwyer, one of the Black Bears’ all-time greats, who closed out her career with 6-3, 6-4 triumph over Arianna Crosby.

“I graduated yesterday, and to be here today with all these people who won the first state championship with us and a few new additions, it’s pretty incredible,” Dwyer said. “This one’s a little bittersweet because it’s the last one and we can’t come back, but it’s probably a little better than the first.”

The win capped off a year of high expectations for a Maranacook team that coach Lou Gingras thought was among his best even before the season began. The Black Bears’ only loss was a 3-2 defeat in the regular-season finale against Lincoln Academy, which won the Class B title earlier Wednesday.

“We didn’t really think about (the high expectations),” Dwyer said. “We just took it one match at a time; we were just going to do what we could do, and that’s all.”