BURLINGTON, Vt. – The University of Vermont spent the months of December and January getting kicked around by every team fortunate enough to have the Catamounts on its schedule.

A week ago, the Cats ended an 11-game skid by beating Hartford, another of America East’s lower echelon teams.

And on Saturday afternoon, coach Tom Brennan was celebrating a bonafide winning streak after his team had upended the University of Maine 77-74 in front of 1,269 of his closest friends. The win was Vermont’s fourth, and its second home win in a row over the Bears.

Brennnan got a 23-point effort from star senior Tony Orciari, who scored only two points in Orono on Jan. 8, 19 points and seven rebounds from Trevor Gaines, and proudly announced to everyone who would listen that the Cats are back.

“When we were limping around, nobody said anything but ‘Can I do more,’ and that’s why I was convinced that we would turn the corner,” Brennan said.

The Catamounts turned that corner on two wheels, coming up with an answer for each Black Bear hoop down the stretch and proving that despite their 8-13 record (4-8 in America East), a wide-open conference race may well include them.

Maine dropped to 15-7, 8-5.

Maine guard Huggy Dye scored his 1,000th career point, but he wasn’t celebrating after the game. Instead, the junior from Danville, Ill., headed to the Maine locker room, where he reacted to the last-second loss by punching the glass window of a door that leads to the locker room, Vermont sports information director Bruce Bosley said.

The flying glass cut Dye above his left eye, and he received six stitches.

“He’s not the first player in the history of college basketball to lose a game and punch something,” Giannini said. “It’s not extreme behavior.”

Dye was not available to talk about the incident after the game. For the record, Dye scored his 1,000th on a fadeaway 3-pointer from the right corner with 7:51 left in the game.

Maine led for the last time in the game at 70-68 after two Tory Cavalieri free throws with 3:06 to go. Orciari knotted it at 70-70 on two free throws, then the Catmounts’ post players made the game’s two biggest plays.

First, sophomore Matt Sheftic followed up an Orciari miss with a conventional 3-point play to make it 73-70 with 1:25 to go.

Then, after Maine’s Julian Dunkley (13 points, 10 rebounds) made two free throws at the 1:09 mark, Gaines turned in another scrappy effort.

Orciari drove to the right of the lane and had his shot blocked by Maine’s Derrick Jackson. An opportunistic Gaines gathered in the one-hop rebound and hit a back-breaking layup with 42 seconds to play.

“They say the basketball gods even those out. Not in my situation,” Brennan said. “There’s somebody getting my breaks in the Pac 10. I don’t get ’em. But today I got a big one and I’m very thankful for it.”

Cavalieri, who scored nine points and handed out eight assists, pulled UMaine back within two with a driving layup with 20 seconds to play and Orciari set the stage for a potential tying shot when he missed one of two free throws with 17.1 ticks left.

Maine got two decent looks at the hoop: Colin Haynes’ 3-point effort was short, and Cavalieri’s turnaround bomb from the left corner rattled in and out at the buzzer.

The Bears got 17 first-half points from Carvell Ammons and 11 more from Colin Haynes en route to a 39-32 at the break. Ammons managed only two more and Haynes went scoreless in the second half as the Bears spread the offense around. All 13 of Dunkley’s points came after intermission.

Vermont knotted the score at 45-all at the 13:42 mark and matched scores with the Bears for the rest of the game: Neither team led by more than four points for the last 14 minutes of the game, and the two squads battled through nine ties and six lead changes over that span.

Gaines scored 12 of his points in an eight-minute span as the Catamounts made a concerted effort to pound the ball into the post against Maine.

“We wanted to attack them inside because we thought we had a mismatch inside,” Orciari said. “We didn’t think those guys really wanted to play much defense down low.”

Grant Anderson added 10 points for Vermont while Sheftic had nine.

But the dominance of Gaines confused Giannini.

Catamounts 77, Black Bears 74

Maine (15-7) Vermont (8-13)

Player G AG F AF TP Player G AG AF TP

Dunkley 4 12 4 4 13 Anderson 3 10

Greene 3 5 0 0 6 Gaines 7 12 19

Ammons 9 14 1 3 19 Sheftic 3 6 9

Cavalieri 3 9 2 2 9 Sorrentine 2 5

Jackson 2 6 3 4 7 Orciari 6 17 10 23

Haynes 4 11 0 0 11 Anderson 0 0

Dye 3 8 0 0 9 Jones 1 1 0 2

White 0 1 0 0 0 Sullivan 1 3

McLaughlin 3 3 6

Totals 28 66 10 13 74 Totals 26 59 20 26 77

Maine 39 74

Vermont 32 77

3-pt. goals: Maine (8-28): Dunkley 1-3, Ammons 0-1, Cavalieri 1-6, Jackson 0-4, Haynes 3-7, Dye 3-7; Vermont (5-18): Anderson 0-3, Gaines 0-2, Sorrentine 1-4, Orciari 3-8, Sullivan 1-1

Attendance: 1,269