Big games, big athletes, big hearts

At the time, it was all that mattered; the lives, the loves, and the happiness of everybody involved seemed to hang in the balance of one Little Ten Conference football matchup put on display at Garland Street Field in Bangor.

It was October 1967, a time best remembered for the Boston Red Sox and their “Impossible Dream” World Series against the St. Louis Cardinals. For a couple of hours on a sunny Saturday afternoon, however, legendary names like Yastrzemski, Lonborg, Gibson, and Brock were temporarily replaced by names of local heroes like Anderson, Annis, Casey, and Myers.

The Little Ten Conference, today known simply by its LTC initials, has been a bastion of “big” high school football games over the years. Just last Saturday, Orono and Winslow, a pair of undefeated teams, met in yet another “big” game.

Twenty-five years ago, though, it was Orono and Foxcroft Academy, two unbeaten teams, meeting head-to-head, under special circumstances, in front of 3,000 fans, in a game made bigger by the passage of time.

Officially, it went down as a 14-0 victory for Foxcroft. The Ponies were led by the rushing of Trey Anderson (142 yards on 28 carries) and Dick Annis (121 yards on 26 carries) and the defensive effort of Dave Anderson (three interceptions).

Two and a half decades later, however, it’s the memories which make the game even more special.

Driving rains had pounded the region that week. Orono was to have hosted the game, but the Riots’ field was unplayable. After a few phone calls, Garland Street Field was confirmed as the site of the game.

“It was our Super Bowl,” said Sean Casey, Orono’s quarterback. “It was our chance to be on Garland Street Field. That was how we approached it. It was very exciting and I think the crowd was a testimony to how big the game was.”

“That was a big deal at the time,” Dave “Hawk” Anderson, Foxcroft’s QB, said. “What made it even nicer was there was a huge crowd there. It provided a facilty to showcase two great teams. We just seemed to have the answers that day.”

Orono was perenially one of the premier teams in the Little Ten ranks. They had won the ’66 state title and 18 straight games entering the Foxcroft matchup. A year earlier, Orono had ended FA’s 30-game home winning streak 40-7.

“It had set the tone for the next year,” Dave Anderson said of the loss in ’66. “Of course, a different outcome was on our mind.”

It was a game, a season, and a year which holds a special memory for Dave Anderson.

Years later, he would go on to become a successful eastern Maine boys basketball coach and, ironically, Orono’s athletic director.

But ’67, even though he didn’t know it at the time, offered him one last opportunity to play with his brother, Trey, a small (5-foot-7, 140 pounds) athlete with a huge heart.

In the summer of ’68, after one of the most successful Foxcroft Academy sports years in history, Trey, who would have been a senior when school started, was killed when he fell off a cliff and into the Piscataquis River in Dover-Foxcroft.

“It was pretty tough to deal with,” Dave said. “Trey was just a tough nut who played all out. It was so unexpected and so tragic. We were on top of the world after our junior year. There was just no stopping us.”

It was a time of innocence. But, the losses – on and off the field – hurt. They still do. They always will. It’s an early lesson, it seems, in what life can be like once the innocence disappears.

“We were a bunch of 15- and 16-year-old kids who thought we were playing for the Super Bowl championship,” said Casey, now AD and men’s basketball coach at the University of Maine-Machias. “It’s interesting that you can go 20-1 in your last three years of football and all you can remember is a game at Garland Street Field and the hollow feeling of walking off that field.”

It was an era of big games, big athletes, and big hearts. In another 25 years, perhaps last Saturday’s Winslow-Orono game may bring forth such memories as another LTC contest played 25 years ago.