ORONO – With 3.2 seconds left in regulation, University of Maine coach John Giannini called two straight timeouts to plot a way to defeat Vermont.

In the first, he told his team to get the ball to Andy Bedard. In the second – spurred by a Vermont defensive scheme that put a much taller, slower player on Huggy Dye, he changed his mind. Dye didn’t get a shot off when Vermont guessed right and came out of the same timeout with the slow man on Bedard.

At the end of overtime, Giannini left the ball in Bedard’s hands, and the junior Rumford native made it pay off.

Bedard nailed a high-arching eight-footer at the buzzer to give the Black Bears a 74-72 come-from-behind win.

The Bears improved to 13-5 overall and into a first-place tie in America East at 8-2, while the Catamounts dropped to 7-11, 3-7.

The Black Bears called timeout with 28.3 seconds to go in overtime and the shot clock off, then proceeded to milk the clock down to its final 10 seconds.

With an energetic crowd of 2,367 chanting off the dwindling seconds, Bedard called fellow Boston College transfer Nate Fox toward him with five seconds to go with a couple of frantic gestures, then ignored the screen, using it as a decoy and bolting in the other direction – left – to the hoop.

His shot was true.

“I thought I was gonna use [the screen] the whole way, but when the guy thinks you’re gonna use it, he kind of leans,” Bedard said. “I saw him leaning that way a little bit. So I just came back the other way. I wanted to get a clean look at it a jumper from the elbow with no time to go.”

He got better than that, launching his shot from a step inside the left elbow.

Fox leaped for a potential rebound and one official, apparently thinking that the forward had touched the ball when it was in the cylinder, waved Bedard’s shot off. The other two referees overruled him.

Fox said the official made the right call.

“It was a basket. It wasn’t even close. I went in for the rebound and I knew it was nothing but the bottom of the net, and I let it go,” Fox said. “That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.”

Bedard finished with a game-high 22 points and dished out six assists, while Fox netted 19 and grabbed 10 rebounds. Eight of his rebounds came after intermission.

Marcus Wills contributed 12 points, and Allen Ledbetter scored 12 to go with eight rebounds.

David Roach scored 15 points, including seven over the final minute and in overtime, for the Catamounts. Tony Orciari added 14 and Corry McLaughlin scored 10, all in the first half.

Giannini said that after a slow start during which the Bears allowed Vermont to grab 15 of the game’s first 17 rebounds and take a 20-point first-half lead, the Bears recovered – but not because of their consistency.

“I was pleased with certain things. I thought that we got some big stops and I also thought that we got some big baskets where we really executed well, especially the last possession,” he said.

Vermont ended up outrebounding the Bears 41-28, maintaining that early 13-board edge.

Things got so bad on the boards in the first half that when the league’s leading rebounder – Ledbetter – finally cleared the ball off the defensive glass with 4:11 to go, the crowd answered the feat with a loud ovation.

The Bears pulled within two points twice early in the second half and as close as one once only to watch the Catamounts answer. But it wasn’t until Ledbetter nailed the front end of a one-and-one with 1:34 to go that they got back to even.

But even then, Vermont’s Roach quickly gave the Cats a 67-65 lead when he drove to the hoop and banked a four-footer home.

Bedard reknotted it at 67-67 with his own drive and layup with 38.8 seconds to go, and Vermont called timeout with 28.2 ticks left.

But Maine buckled down on `D’ and Orciari didn’t get a shot off before the shot clock buzzer sounded with 3.2 seconds to go.

Bears 74, Catamounts 72 (OT)

Vermont men (7-11) Maine (13-5)

Name G AG F AF TP Name G AG F AF TP

Steele 1 3 0 0 2 Fox 7 12 5 5 19

Chotkowski 4 7 1 2 9 Ledbetter 4 6 4 6 12

Carberry 4 10 1 4 9 Wills 5 10 1 2 12

Orciari 5 17 0 0 14 Bedard 9 15 3 3 22

Roach 6 12 0 0 15 Faison 1 1 2 2 5

Murphy 3 7 0 0 9 Dye 2 7 0 0 4

Gaines 2 3 0 0 4 Haynes 0 1 0 0 0

McLaughlin 5 8 0 0 10 Meeks 0 4 0 0 0

Nemitz 0 1 0 0 0

Totals 30 68 2 6 72 Totals 28 56 15 18 74

Vermont 38 29 5 72

Maine 27 40 7 74

3-pt. goals: Vermont (10-25): Orciari 4-13, Roach 3-6, Murphy 3-5, Nemitz 0-1; Maine (3-18): Wills 1-4, Bedard 1-4, Faison 1-1, Meeks 0-3, Dye 0-4, Haynes 0-1, Fox 0-1

Attendance: 2,367