Nicole Bowden, 17, pulled onto the shoulder of Route 1A in Ellsworth on Friday afternoon, hit the brakes and flipped on her hazards.

Kim Tupper, 18, and Bailey MacKenzie, 16, hopped out of the car and trudged through the icy wind and over a crusty snowbank.

They had done this so many times that they had their routine down: Kim carried a hammer and bag of nails. Bailey held a cardboard circle, painted like a basketball, with the name “Murphy” written across the middle.

As they tacked the sign to a roadside telephone pole, a tractor-trailer roared by.

The three Ellsworth High School cheerleaders screamed in unison: “Aaaaaaaaghhhhh!”

“This is hard,” Bailey said, back in the car. “I hope they know.”

They know. So does the guy in the dump truck who drove by a few minutes later, honking and giving the girls the thumbs up.

For cheerleaders, friends and parents of eastern Maine’s basketball elite, this annual ritual of mounting handmade billboards to support their players isn’t exactly a picnic.

It’s cold. It’s painful, especially if you whack your finger with a hammer.

And sometimes – as Friday’s near brush with an 18-wheeler proved – it can be dangerous.

But they wouldn’t have it any other way.

Come tournament time, all roads lead to Bangor. The signs, which stretch for miles like Burma Shave ads along the highways and byways of eastern Maine, provide a little encouragement along the way.

“When we drive to Bangor, everyone gets on one side of the bus and we watch the signs as we go by to see what they say,” Corey DeWitt, captain of the Ellsworth High School boys team, said before Friday’s game with Hermon. “It’d be a big letdown if they didn’t do it. They’ve always been there.”

Nobody is quite sure where or when the tradition started, and the victory messages vary from year to year. In some towns, paper plates and fluorescent poster board adorn telephone poles or wood stakes. In others, elaborately designed, hand-painted cardboard cutouts are the standard.

“Different people do it every time, so there’s not a lot of consistency,” said Valerie Cote of Dexter. Her son Gavin plays on Dexter High School’s varsity team, and her daughter Sabrina played on last year’s Class C state championship team.

“The cheerleaders usually do it. Sometimes the moms do, but it’s really a cheerleader thing. … But all of us moms get into it and help. We’ve all gotten our feet wet in the snowbanks.”

Dexter’s cheerleaders and their parents will hammer their stakes into the frozen ground Tuesday morning, from the beginning of Spring Street to the motor lodge on Corinna Road – more than a mile. The final ones read: “Last one out of town, turn off the lights.”

“You get into that fever, and it’s all everyone talks about,” said Teresa Page, a former Dexter cheering mom. Her daughter graduated last year, but she’s going to the Bangor Auditorium this week anyway. “I plan my work schedule around it. I tell my boss, when it’s tournament time, sorry.”

The exodus isn’t confined to Dexter. Deer Isle and Stonington become ghost towns when the Mariners play, and the signs – nailed to telephone poles, taped up in store windows, even suspended from a backhoe – have become the stuff of legend.

In Ellsworth, this year’s lineup – 39 signs in all – covers 1.2 miles along Route 1A. While impressive, this is not even close to the city’s record, set in 1988, when Ellsworth won the Eastern Maine Class B championship.

“That was the big Timmy Scott year,” said Rhonda Ulichny, a former EHS cheerleader, referring to Scott’s last-minute scoring binge to bring the Eagles back from a 13-point deficit against Mattanawcook. Ulichny now coaches the girls varsity cheering squad. “I think that was the year the signs went all the way to Dedham.”

This is shaping up to be the big Corey DeWitt year. On Friday night, he broke the 22-year record for points scored in an Eastern Maine Class B tournament game.

When the cheerleaders took over the school’s art room last week, armed with a case of tempera paint and a stack of broken-down cardboard boxes, they had no way of knowing DeWitt would shoot lights-out in the opening game. They also didn’t know the Eagles’ triple-overtime victory over Hermon would be dubbed “a game for the ages” by one reporter.

They did know that “lights out” wouldn’t be in their sign rotation. When they tried the classic “last one out of town, turn off the lights” lineup for their own cheering competition, someone ripped down that part of the message.

“Don’t write that!” Bailey MacKenzie shouted when one of her friends suggested it. “MDI did that long before we ever thought of it.”

“Yeah, but we did that back in ’90,” Ulichny said.

“MDI’s been doing it forever!” Lauren Taylor exclaimed, and since MDI High School is Ellsworth’s rival, the argument ended there.

For an hour, the art room hummed with activity – the girls set up an assembly line to paint lines on the basketballs and occasionally stopped for an impromptu cheer. At one point, a Tide To Go stick made the rounds to erase the inevitable paint stains from jeans and sweat shirts.

They painted short cheers, one word per sign: “Turn up the heat, the Eagles can’t be beat”; “Defense stay strong”; “March on to victory.” Ulichny suggested using the words to the school’s fight song, but the girls decided against it – too many telephone poles.

If the Eagles keep winning – they play third-ranked Camden Hills on Wednesday – the cheerleaders may change their minds. They might even have to reconsider their stance on “Last one out of town, turn out the lights.”

After all, it’s tourney time. And all signs point to victory.

BDN writers Dawn Gagnon, Andrew Neff and Pete Warner contributed to this report.