LEWISTON – The most important part of Saturday’s state team tennis championship matches in all three classes may have been the warm-up sessions.

It was at those points in all three team matches that many of the players who wound up on the losing sides may have realized the difficulty of the task ahead.

“During warm-ups, you could definitely tell they’d been playing a lot,” said Caribou No. 2 singles player Michelle Ouellette. “We knew we might have a tough time.”

Indeed they did. The previously unbeaten Vikings were still in a state of shock over the ease with which the undefeated Falmouth Yachtsmen beat them 5-0 to earn their first-ever state Class B tennis title.

“I knew it was going to be a tough day, but at least when you’re playing somebody good, it’s better tennis,” said top Caribou singles player Jessica Belanger, who was beaten 6-0, 6-3 by Kristen Meahl.

The 15-0 Yachtsmen didn’t even drop a single set in the match while winning 60 of 73 games. Caribou coach John Habeeb, whose Vikings were making their second straight state finals appearance, chalked it up to a difference in talent, experience and resources.

“I’m going to say it’s probably a combination of being very skilled from playing a lot in the winter time – they have indoor facilities nearby and a coach who works with the girls year round – and the resources they have to work with,” he said. “When we won states in Class A, it seemed like the teams we played maybe had one or two players who got a lot of private help, but now it seems like whole teams are getting it.”

Caribou still has a 168-match regular season win streak going that’s lasted 14 years, and counting.

“It’s not that [winning] is expected, but we expect it of ourselves,” Belanger said. “We have to because we don’t want to end the string. In fact, we want to make it longer.”

“You have more coaches down here, more facilities, and more skilled players and the difference in their caliber was just evident.”

It was in Class C too as the Winthrop Ramblers capped a 16-0 season with a 4-0 win over Orono for their first state tennis championship. In the Class A match, the Mount Ararat Eagles of Topsham knocked off Deering of Portland 4-1 to cap another 15-0 season and a second straight state title

The Class C match went much the same as B as Orono’s Red Riots barely had time to be frustrated or impressed by Winthrop’s dominant outing.

“I was totally psyched out by the girl I played in warm-ups,” Orono freshman and No. 3 singles player Katie Foley admitted. “She hit everything hard and I was on my heels.”

Elysse Cole blanked Foley 6-0 in an opening set that seemed almost over before it began. Foley regrouped in the second set and took a 4-1 lead before Cole reeled off five straight.

Cole’s straight-set win wasn’t the only one by Winthrop as her teammates won all eight sets, dropping just 17 of the 65 games played.

“They’d been working for this for four years with a lot of seniors on that team and they did a good job,” said Orono coach Dean Armstrong, whose Red Riots wind up 11-5 on the season. “It was a humbling experience for us, but we’ll learn from this and come back.”

This season exorcised a lot of demons for the Ramblers.

“We’ve been in it the last three years, but we always lost to Waynflete or North Yarmouth,” said Winthrop coach Wilbur Shardlow. “This year we beat Waynflete in the quarterfinals and NYA in the final to win our first West championship.”

“Waynflete beat us in the semis the last two years, so getting by them was really big for us,” said No. 2 doubles player Sarah Cook.