BUCKSPORT – The Bucksport Golden Bucks have battled their way to the Eastern Maine Class C football championship behind a high-powered offense featuring 2,400-yard tailback Nick Tymoczko.

But some of the bigger plays of this undefeated season have come not on the ground, but through the airways.

Take last Saturday’s 26-25 survival of Foxcroft Academy in the regional final.

A two-minute drill at the end of the first half produced one touchdown, with senior quarterback Joey Carmichael lofting a 9-yard fade pass over two defenders to classmate John Harvey in the right edge of the end zone.

And a fourth-quarter drive that gave the 11-0 Golden Bucks their first and only lead was kept alive when Carmichael connected with Adam Tweedie for a 17-yard completion on third-and-13 from the Bucksport 42.

And when those teams met earlier in the season, a 36-yard pass from Carmichael to Harvey set up a TD just before halftime that was a crucial momentum builder as the Golden Bucks earned a 34-21 victory.

All of these notable passing moments don’t come as a surprise to those who know Bucksport best, because in Carmichael the Golden Bucks have a time-tested quarterback who has thrown for big numbers before.

Just a year earlier, he passed for more than 1,000 yards while leading the Golden Bucks to a berth in the LTC semifinals.

“If we had wanted to line up and throw the ball this season, 2,000 yards would have been a realistic goal for Joey,” said Bucksport coach Joel Sankey, whose club faces 11-0 Jay for the state title at 6 p.m. Saturday at Fitzpatrick Stadium in Portland. “But he’s a team player, he doesn’t care about statistics. He doesn’t care if he throws five times or 50 times in a game, he just wants to win.”

Carmichael passed for 558 yards and four touchdowns during a 2004 regular season in which Bucksport was rarely tested and the need to pass rarely arose – particularly as Tymoczko was putting together one of the best rushing years in Maine schoolboy history.

“I knew we were probably going to run the ball more because we had Nick Tymoczko and he’s a great running back,” said Carmichael, whose home field in Bucksport is named for his grandfather, Bob Carmichael, who coached football at Bucksport from 1961 to 1977.

“I really didn’t think about passing less, I just wanted to do what we needed to do to win.”

That’s a stance similar to one he took during his sophomore year, when he moved from quarterback to tight end because of the presence of talented senior quarterback Dow Cain.

But when Cain dislocated a finger just before that year’s Eastern Maine final against Foxcroft, Carmichael stepped in to fill the quarterback breach.

Bucksport lost that game, but it served as a springboard to a strong junior year for Carmichael, and that has served as a springboard for him to sacrifice some individual statistics in the quest for a state championship as a senior.

“Joey’s been a great leader who has taken control of the offense when we’ve needed him to do it,” said Sankey. “In a lot of situations I’ll just call the formation, and Joey will call the play from the line. He’s a real student of the game.”

That understanding of the game was in evidence late in the first half of the EM final, when time was fleeting and the ground game for one brief moment this season wasn’t a primary option, save for a key draw play by Chris Maguire that was set up by the threat of the pass.

“In the Eastern Maine game we weren’t running as well as we usually do because Foxcroft was really coming hard to the ball,” said Carmichael, who hopes to continue his football career in college next year. “But at the end of the second quarter we went to the pass when we had to and we were able to score. It was something we had to do at the time.”

Bucksport surely will look to establish the run Saturday against a pass-oriented Jay team with a talented quarterback of its own in senior Justin Wells.

But the Golden Bucks are comfortable knowing that with Joey Carmichael and a talented corps of receivers, theirs is an offense that is far from one-dimensional.

“The teams up here know what Joey can do,” said Sankey. “The kid from Jay has a gun, he can just rifle the ball, but if they line up 10 in the box against us thinking we can’t throw … Joey can throw the ball, and in Nick and John Harvey and Deven Eaton and some others we’ve got a number of kids who can go and catch it.”