Bears never believed they were losers

ORONO – Losing streak? What losing streak?

Make it one win in a row for the University of Maine football team. One grade A extra large farm fresh 19-13 win Saturday over previously 18th-ranked Delaware. One win that left egg running down the Blue Hens’ faces.

Those nine straight losses Maine had stumbled and bumbled and fumbled through dating back to last season, putting these Black Bears within one more `L’ of matching the program’s modern-era record 10-game stretch of futility between 1967-68?

“You guys know anything about that?” second-year UMaine head coach Jack Cosgrove asked the four grinning UM players who accompanied him to the postgame interview. “All I know is we’ve got a one-game winning streak.”

No, the Maine contingent said, losing streaks and history and bad karma never came up in conversation in all that time since Oct. 16, 1993, the date of the Bears’ last victory before Saturday.

“We don’t like to talk about losses,” said Steve Knight, the senior fullback who switched to tailback just for Delaware then punished the Hens with a career-high 162 yards on 33 carries. “Our team has been doing a lot of things well. We knew we had to erase the things we weren’t doing well.”

One play at a time. One series. One quarter. One half. Remember the good. Erase the bad. That’s how these Bears, now 1-4, have been living for almost a year. That’s the effect a losing streak has on those on the inside. Losing compartmentalizes the game, shrinks it, the better to analyze and improve.

The focus had gotten so fine lately Cosgrove had begun switching senior quarterbacks Emilio Colon and Joe Marsilio every two series. If that meant Colon, Maine’s No. 2 all-time passer, had to swallow some pride, so be it. The program’s past and future had been reduced to two series.

“If I moved the offense, I’d stay in there. If Joe was moving the offense, he’d stay in there. Coach happened to go with me in the second half,” shrugged Colon, who rewarded Cosgrove’s trust by hitting James Rice with a pinpoint 32-yard scoring pass to give Maine the lead for good with 2:07 left in the third period.

If the 7,352 homecomers in the stands at Alumni Field wanted to see this victory as something bigger, as revenge for the 57-13 loss Delaware hung on Maine two years ago, or the 35-28 loss the Blue Hens handed the then-unbeaten 1989 Bears, or the 62-0 humiliation head coach Tubby Raymond’s bunch dispensed back in ’72, go right ahead. The ’94 Bears will simply take the `W’.

From the fans’ perspective, a win couldn’t get much sweeter.

That 62-0 blowout? Keep it, Delaware. Maine fans will take this. They’ll take UD coming up here all fat and overconfident facing an 0-4 Maine team. They’ll take Raymond and his wing-T offense averaging 445 yards and 34 points a game being held to fractions of those numbers.

Tell you what, Tubby, Maine fans could say by the third quarter. The Bears won’t do anything fancy on offense. They’ll just line up with two tight ends and two fullbacks and run right at you. No gambles. Chris Binder will kick a couple of field goals. Maine will take the points when they can get them.

Defensively, the Bears will simply hit every wing and every T that moves.

Nuthin’ fancy. No tricks. Just 60 minute of hell.

When it was over Maine fans had witnessed a 19-13 win that felt more like 49-13. That’s the feeling that was created by the Bears running the ball up and down the field all day, converting 11 of 17 third downs and holding the ball for 40:53 of possession time.

Later, Maine fans could savor the image of Raymond, the legend, reduced to complaining in the postgame about how his team “played awful” or “played flat” or “played soft.”

At least one fan in the stands, though, took a deeper satisfacton away from this win.

Gene Benner knows about Maine losing streaks. He was a sophomore wide receiver when the Bears went 0-8 in 1967 under a first-year head coach named Walter Abbott. Benner was a junior when Maine lost its first two games of ’68 to make it 10 straight `L’s, the program’s worst stretch since World War II.

“I’ll tell you how we got out of it,” recalled Benner, who was inducted into the UM Sports Hall of Fame Friday night. “We were a large group of freshmen, most of us from Maine. We committed ourselves to getting better. We committed ourselves to Walter Abbott. And we never gave up.

“That’s what I see in this team,” Benner said. “I’ve seen them on TV this year before this game. They’re committed to getting better. That’s why I’ll be glad to keep that losing record for those teams I was on.”