BREWER – From the very beginning of Saturday’s Penobscot Valley Conference Large School Track Championships, Jon Dearborn went about his business with one eye on a team title and the other on a watch that would tell him when his day was over.

“Family first,” the Brewer High sprinter said with a smile after winning his first individual event of the day, the 400.

Here’s what those cryptic words meant: His brother, Jay, was graduating from the University of Pennsylvania on Sunday. The last plane from Bangor was leaving at 5 p.m. And Jon Dearborn and his father were going to be on it.

No matter what.

Dearborn had already helped lead the Witches to a 400-meter relay win and won the open 400. He would eventually win the 200 as well. But after steady early rain put the meet almost an hour behind schedule, he was unsure if he’d get to anchor Brewer’s 1,600-meter relay team in the meet’s final event.

“I want to get [the relay] in,” Dearborn said. “We went into this meet hoping that we might have a chance to pull out a PVC title. But if it comes down to it? I’ve got to go with my brother. He’s my family. And he’s been with me a lot longer than Brewer High School Track.”

Luckily for Dearborn – and the Witches – he did run the final leg of the relay, with his team clinging to a slim five-point lead over Bangor.

Dearborn ran at 3:50. He and his father had agreed to leave at 4.

And all he did was erase a slight Bangor lead and cap the meet with another victory.

Brewer finished with 108 points to top the 10-team field of Class A and B teams while Bangor eliminated a late deficit with a 1-2-3 finish in the javelin and finished with 101. Mount Desert Island tallied 73, Old Town had 60 and Ellsworth scored 58.

Jeff Alden of Caribou was one of two athletes to win three individual events, as he completed a grueling distance triple. He won the 1,600 in 4 minutes, 33.39 seconds, the 800 in 2:06.89 and the 3,200 in 10:01.38. Ellsworth’s Adam MacBeth was the other (long jump, 110 hurdles, 300 hurdles).

In the girls meet, the Bangor girls got two wins from standout junior Emily Capehart and one each from Alison Smith, Miranda Szewc, Jana Savage and Abby Buchanan while scoring 140 points and dominating a strong field of teams.

Old Town finished second with 103 and established itself as a strong contender for Eastern Maine Class B honors while Brewer scored 96.1 and Hampden had 91. Caribou rounded out the top five with 50.

Bangor coach Gary Capehart said that before the meet he looked at the seed sheets, did a little math, and figured out his team might be able to score 139 points.

They proved to be a point better than that.

His daughter Emily emerged as one of the meet’s standouts, winning the long jump (16 feet, 3 inches) and triple jump (34-103/4). The triple jump was a personal best for Capehart, as was her 48.76 clocking in the 300 hurdles. She also ran a leg on Bangor’s victorious 1,600-meter relay team.

Gary Capehart said the Rams’ big guns did what they were expected to do, and the rest of the athletes pitched in well.

“You’ve got to have the people who are gonna score the big points,” he said. “Then those fourths, fifths and sixths really matter.”

The margin of victory was a surprise to Bangor 400 ace Alison Smith, who edged Hermon’s Chantelle Haggerty by three one-hundredths of a second to win that event in 1:00.66.

“We expected a very close meet, not only with Brewer, but with Hampden as well,” Smith said.

As it turned out, the Rams should have been looking out for Old Town as well: coach Rod White’s Indians finished a strong second.

Old Town took a first, a second and a third in the three relays, and got strong efforts from Erin Wilcox (first in the discus), Jessica Stoup (first in the pole vault), sprinter Jessica Dumont (second in the 100, third in the 200), distance runner Hillary Greene (third in the 3,200, sixth in the 1,600) and Kathyrn Laverdiere (fourth in the 800, third in the javelin).

The Old Town throwers accounted for 28 points.

Athletes dealt with chilly temperatures and sporadic shower during the meet. Bangor’s Emily Capehart said she has come to expect things like that at track meets.

“You always know if you’re a track athlete that you’ll have to battle the elements, whatever they are,” she said. “All of my friends were like, ‘They’re gonna cancel the meet.’ But I knew they wouldn’t cancel just because it was raining in the morning. Most of us came prepared.”

As did the girls distance runners, who provided two of the meet’s highlights.

Presque Isle senior Melissa Blackstone won two of those races and snapped a 17-year-old PVC record by nearly seven seconds while winning a stirring duel in the 1,600.

Blackstone battled Hampden soph Oriana Farley and Brewer senior Heather Jovanelli for 1400 meters before blowing the race open with a devastating kick.

She finished in 5:08.93 after finishing the race with a 68-second lap. Farley’s 5:11.59 for second would have lopped four seconds off the previous PVC mark.

Blackstone, who spent her first two years of high school as a sprinter and didn’t race at 800 meters until her junior season, had a simple plan.

“I know what [Farley and Jovanelli] can do. I just wanted those people behind me and didn’t want to let them get in front of me,” she said.

She didn’t. She used the same tactic to top the same two foes in the 800 in a speedy 2:19.28.

Ellsworth’s Ben Shorey broke the lone boys record in the 1,600 racewalk. Shorey, one of the nation’s top junior walkers, lowered his own mark a gaudy 11 seconds to 6:14.48.