ORONO – In his 24 years as head coach of the Brewer indoor track team, Dave Jeffrey has only had one group of senior girls exit the program without winning an Eastern Maine Indoor Track League title.

On Saturday, the Class of 2003 headed to the University of Maine field house with a couple of near misses … one year in which the meet wasn’t held due to snow … zero titles to their credit … and one final chance.

At the end of the night, one opposing coach, Hampden Academy’s David King, said the meet wasn’t really ever in question.

“In order for us to win this meet, Brewer would have had to have gone to Bowdoin by mistake,” said King – who, by the way, has a pretty good team of his own. “They’ve got talent and depth. We wanted to make as good a run at them as we could, and we wanted to be runner-up. Our girls came on beautifully tonight.”

King got his wish – the Broncos racked up 88 points to finish second. And Jeffrey’s seniors made the most of their final chance at a title, scoring 122 en route to a comfortable win.

Bangor finished third with 85 points while Old Town scored 65 and Mount Desert Island had 16.5.

While Bangor rode its sprint power to its close third-place finish, the Brewer vs. Hampden matchup was intriguing in that it consisted of a pair of head-to-head battles between each team’s top athletes.

Those standouts – Brewer distance ace Heather Clark against Hampden’s Oriana Farley, and Brewer hurdler-jumper Danielle Lainez against Hampden’s MacKenzie Rawcliffe – provided some of the meet’s top competitions.

When the dust cleared, the foursome accounted for 28 points apiece – each won two events and finished second in another – and they shared the meet’s Outstanding Performer award.

Here’s the breakdown: Clark topped Farley in the mile, Farley beat Clark in the 800, and Clark won the two-mile. Farley also won the 400. Lainez won the head-to-head 60 hurdles battle and the pole vault while Rawcliffe took the triple jump over her Brewer foe and also won the long jump.

In the 29 years of the girls EMITL, no more than two athletes have ever shared the award, which is based solely on points scored in the meet.

Clark, one of the nation’s top milers, said winning a team championship was an important goal for her and her classmates.

“It felt like I wouldn’t have had a complete experience had I not been a part of a winning team,” Clark said. “This team has been amazing this year. Comparing this team to the team last year, I never would have pictured that we’d be champions. We had a much larger team last year. We had excellent triple jumpers and sprinters. It’s really shocking.”

Lainez, a junior, won the hurdles rematch against Rawcliffe after falling to her by 1/1,000th of a second last week. That win provided an early lift for the Witches.

“We tied times [to the 100th of a second last week],” Lainez said. “We were neck and neck. She’s always in front of me the first two hurdles, and over the last hurdle into the finish line I always pass her or tie with her. Today I started faster off my blocks.”

In the end, Brewer had just a few too many weapons for Hampden and Bangor to overcome.

Jeffrey said in championship meets, early events sometimes set a trend that can catapult a team to a title … or snowball into disaster. On Saturday, the early returns set the tone for a Brewer win.

“The whole key to us was starting out with the long jump and having those girls [Erica Commeau, Joslynn Pelletier and Rebecca Breau] go 2-3-4, and then going 1-2 in the pole vault,” Jeffrey said, explaining that there were plenty of areas where he was confident in the Witches’ chances.

“I was just scared of the long jump,” he said. “Scared of us getting off to a rocky start, and then having it affect everybody else. When we jumped right out of our shoes in the long jump, I knew we were going to be fine.”

Brewer scored 55 points in nine track events, but racked up 67 more in just five field events en route to the title.