MOUNT DESERT – Until last May, the Mount Desert Island track team hadn’t hosted a home track and field meet in 15 years.

On Friday, the Trojans hosted their first major meet since the MDI Relays were moved as all-weather tracks proliferated in the area.

The MDI boys proved to be rude hosts.

Over the course of 10 minutes early in the Penobscot Valley Conference large school championships, Da Chang scored 18 points with a win in the 100 and a second in the 110 hurdles. Those efforts helped turn an inconsequential 22-point lead into a 43-point bulge that opponents would have to chip away at all night long.

Nobody ever caught up.

MDI posted a 90-84.33 win over runner-up Hampden Academy. Ellsworth (69), Brewer (66.33) and Caribou (64) rounded out the top five.

MDI coach Renee Laber said she doesn’t try to figure out how a meet will turn out, and left her boys with a simple pre-meet thought.

“We said, ‘You guys have a legitimate chance to win this meet,”‘ the 12th-year coach said. ‘Try to score the points that you’re seeded to get, or get points you’re not seeded to get.”‘

In the girls meet, Hampden coach Dave King did everything he could to maximize the Broncos’ point total … including helping distance standout Oriana Farley with her diet.

“He called me on Sunday and said, ‘Do you like fiddleheads?”‘ Farley said with a laugh. “He said they had a lot of magnesium, and I should eat them because I’d be running a lot of events.”

King’s fiddlehead diet worked: Farley ran all three distance races, finishing with a win and two second-place finishes, and anchored the winning HA 1600-meter relay team. The Broncos scored 127 points to win the team title over Caribou (101). Bangor scored 81, Brewer had 72 and Old Town had 70 in the 10-team field made up of Class A and B schools.

King said he figured his team had a 15-point edge according to the seed sheets, and as the meet progressed, his team improved upon that estimate.

“I’d have some kids who wouldn’t do quite as well, and Caribou would have some kids who would do a little better, and the next thing I knew I’d have a kid who’d excel and Caribou would fall a little bit,” King said. “It went that way all meet.”

One team that possessed the front-line talent to compete with MDI for the boys title was indoor Class B state champ Ellsworth … but the banged up and battered Eagles opted to rest up for the next two weeks.

That tactic was especially apparent in the distance races, as each runner in Ellsworth’s talented stable ran just one individual event. In many meets, distance runners race twice, and in some championship meets coaches pull out the stops and run stars in all three distance races.

But with the Eastern Maine Regional scheduled for next week and the state meet to follow, Ellsworth coach Andy Beardsley went the conservative route.

“I hesitate to do four events [counting a relay] repeatedly. It’s just counterproductive a lot of times,” Beardsley said. “Some people can handle it and it builds them up and they work through it. But the way our team’s going, I think I’d be playing with fire to get every point out of this meet when really, Eastern Maines is the stepping stone to states.”

Among the missing for Ellsworth: stars Adam Macbeth (hamstring pull), Erik Maleck (torn abdominal muscles) and Herbie Ryan (broken arm).

Steve DeWitt gave the Eagles the meet’s lone boys PVC record when he ran the 1600 in 4 minutes, 18.81 seconds. Teammate Eric Rudolph took the 800 in a speedy 1:57.69.

MDI’s Laber said the that over the years she has learned not to worry about the competition.

“In track and field, so many things happen,” she said. “You can maybe have control of yourself a little bit, but you don’t have control of something like someone popping a 42-foot triple jump or something.”

Setting records in the girls meet were Emily Capehart of Bangor (47.83 in the 300 hurdles) and Chantelle Haggerty of Hermon (10 feet, 6.25 inches in the pole vault). Haggerty also won the 100 and 400 and anchored the victorious 400 relay squad.

The runner-up Vikings were led by sprinter Lindsay Burlock, who won the 200, took seconds in the 100 and 400, and was fourth in the triple jump.

With regional and state competitions looming over the next two weeks, Hampden’s King has a simple plan in mind.

“I’m going to pick some more fiddleheads tomorrow,” he said.