ORONO – As the first regular-season meet on the Eastern Maine Indoor Track League schedule slowly wound down on Saturday night, longtime Brewer coach Dave Jeffrey wandered from event to event and kept saying the same thing.

“I can’t believe we won this meet,” Jeffrey said, over and over and over.

Here’s one reason Jeffrey was a bit confused: With a boys roster that had been slimmed due to vacation travel plans and a few one-meet suspensions issued to athletes who hadn’t attended practice, his Witches were already limited.

And here’s the other: The team he’s coaching now looks almost nothing like the team he led to the EMITL title in February.

It didn’t matter. The Witches racked up 70 points to runner-up Bangor’s 48 and Mount Desert Island’s 47. Hampden Academy was fourth of four teams in the meet made up of large-school entries with 38 points.

In the other meet, run concurrently at the University of Maine field house, Orono got 1-2 finishes from twins Craig and Adam Jones in both the mile and two mile en route to a 52-52 tie with the Haggerty-led Hermon Hawks.

Ben Haggerty won the 800 (2 minutes, 14.88 seconds) and the high jump (5 feet, 6 inches) and Adam Haggerty captured titles in the long jump (17-31/4) and the pole vault (9-6).

Mattanawcook Academy of Lincoln was third in the meet with 49 and John Bapst of Bangor took fourth with 9.

In the big-school boys meet, Jeffrey explained the Witches are in a similar situation to most teams in the EMITL.

“We had a very, very strong senior class last year in the league, and really the only team that has a lot of kids back is Ellsworth,” said Jeffrey, who has been coaching at Brewer since the 1979-80 season.

Hampden’s David King, who began coaching the Broncos during the 1975-76 season, concurred.

“Every once in awhile, you get a season in which teams are heavily laden with seniors across the board,” King said. “They graduate and it leaves a void. This year Ellsworth happens to have that class of seniors a year behind everybody else.”

But with those graduation losses, the door opens for new standouts to emerge. On Saturday, the Witches got two wins from senior distance man Ian Fraser (800, mile) a win from Mike Evancheck in the two mile, and a victory from Rob Gray in the triple jump.

“What we’re trying to do is we’re trying to search for a team. We’re trying to build a team out of the kids that we have because we have so many new faces,” Jeffrey said. “Yeah, we’re looking for progress. But we’re looking for an identity.”

Brewer’s distance corps captured six places and 24 points in three races. Fraser was the catalyst and provided one of the day’s top finishes when he nipped HA’s Brian Herasymchuck by .04 in the 800.

“I thought he was gonna stay ahead of me. I was going all out and he was going all out,” Fraser said.

But at the end, he prevailed by outleaning his foe to hit the line in 2:07.13.

“It was this motion right here,” Fraser said, demonstrating by thrusting his right shoulder forward. “I thought it was just enough to get me by.”

Hampden’s King said one athlete who stepped forward on Saturday was his junior sprinter, Eric Libby.

Libby won the 60 and 200, setting personal bests in each.

“I was just trying to get under seven seconds in the 60,” said Libby, who clocked a 6.95 in that event. “In the 200, Mr. King wanted me to get the school record, but I was a half-second off. I just wanted to finish first in the meet.”

In the other boys meet, the smaller schools’ lack of team depth showed on the results sheet: Five places would have been scored in each event, but in eight of 12 individual events, there were fewer than five athletes entered.

Orono also got a win from Nick LeGrande (shot put), while Matt Joy won the 60 and 200 for the Hawks.