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LIVERMORE FALLS — A cold wind blew across Griffin Field on Tuesday afternoon as the Spruce Mountain football team began practice. It was barely 4 p.m., but the lights were coming on and flakes of snow fell here and there.

This is when every high school football team in Maine wants to be practicing, in November, when it’s cold and dark.

The Phoenix are preparing to take on Camden Hills in the eight-man Large School state championship game Saturday at Edward Little High School in Auburn. Getting to this point has taken a decade and a half, a slow grind through decades-long rivalries to find the right coach at the right moment.

Spruce Mountain was born from the merging of Livermore Falls and Jay high schools in 2011. At the time of the consolidation, you couldn’t find bigger rivals in the state of Maine. Ask Cony and Gardiner if they’d like to merge. Or Edward Little and Lewiston. Or Portland and Deering (an idea that’s floated around for a few years now).

Jay and Livermore Falls annually closed the football season against each other. They even kept separate campuses the first couple of years after the merger. Some Livermore people didn’t want their kids coached by someone from Jay, and that sentiment was shared by some in Jay. It was an arranged marriage that took time to flourish.

Deeply rooted rivalries are vampires. They suck the life from something new and are hard to kill. At Spruce Mountain, the stake appears to be driven right through the heart of that old animosity.

“I haven’t really experienced any of that since I’ve been here. We have a great community backing us up,” said Devin Roberts, who became the head coach in 2024 following a winless 2023 season. “Everyone has been supportive of me, the staff, and the team.”

Time helps, too. The current players were toddlers when the merger happened. Spruce Mountain is the only high school they’ve known. Their parents and grandparents were Andies and Tigers, not them. To the 2025 Phoenix, those are just stories, old yearbooks, and banners on a gym wall.

“We’re all kind of just a family now,” said junior quarterback Dylan Jewett.

Jermarre Spraggins, a senior two-way lineman, moved to Livermore Falls from Lewiston prior to his junior year. He didn’t grow up surrounded by the ghosts of an ancient rivalry. He just wanted to play ball with his new friends.

“I got told it was a big thing,” he said. “Being part of this group is special. We’re all together now.”

Winning will do that. The Phoenix went 7-1 in the regular season last year and reached the eight-man Small School South semifinals. This season, back in the Large School division, the winning continued.

Roberts came from a winning program at Mountain Valley. A 2007 graduate of the Rumford school, he was a member of two state championship teams in 2004 and 2006. He learned from one of the best coaches the state has seen, Jim Aylward. Roberts coached his alma mater for a few seasons, then stepped away for two seasons and became a ref. When he saw the Spruce Mountain job was open, he got the itch to coach again.

“When I decided to apply here, my wife said you’re crazy. They’re 0-8. But as a coach, or previous coach, I paid attention to athletes still, and I saw the potential,” Roberts said. “Being part of something and building it from the ground up is not easy.”

Aylward taught Roberts and his teammates to respect the game, and it will respect you back and give you more in return. That’s what he’s trying to impart on his team. He’s seen the team culture change for the better.

When the Phoenix lost to Yarmouth in September, they regrouped. In practices following that loss, Roberts saw the players policing themselves, keeping each other in line and focused on the task at hand. A few weeks later, in a close game against Stearns, he saw it come together in a tight, 28-24 win.

“Once we got into that third quarter, they had that feeling again, like oh, man, we might lose again,” Roberts said. “You could see it in their play, in their demeanor, we’re not going to let that happen.”

There might be some in the Spruce Mountain community who pine for the old rivalry, who would love nothing more than to see the Tigers and Andies battle again. That’s not going to happen. The last time either Jay or Livermore Falls played for a football state title was in 2004, when Jay lost to Bucksport in the Class C final. That’s long over.

The players know they’re Phoenix now, and they’re rising above all of that.