In some respects, the John Bapst Crusaders represent the hope all struggling high school football teams share.

For while the private high school on Broadway in Bangor with no football feeder program is having its best season in more than three decades, it was just a few years ago when the program was enduring the toughest of times.

Between a Week 4 win over Dexter in 1998 and a Week 2 victory over Maranacook of Readfield in 2003, John Bapst suffered 41 consecutive losses.

That’s four full seasons, along with a 1998 season that ended with several forfeits because the Crusaders could not field a full varsity team.

But under the guidance of fifth-year head coach Dan O’Connell, John Bapst football is back. The Crusaders have a nine-game winning streak to celebrate, as well as a trip to top-ranked Foxcroft Academy on Saturday with the chance to win their first LTC (Eastern Maine Class C) championship since the school’s undefeated 1976 team led by all-conference players Dennis Whitney, Greg Veilleux, Tom McCarthy, Mike Dionne and Bob Ford.

“As a senior it’s huge to get there with the kids you grew up with playing in all three sports here at Bapst,” said current Crusaders’ quarterback Kyle Gallant. “But for the first time in I don’t even know how long in Bapst history to get to the Eastern Maine final [1991] is huge, not only for the seniors but for the whole school.”

The second-seeded Crusaders (9-1) earned another week of postseason play in dramatic fashion Monday night, with Derek Smith’s 55-yard punt return for a touchdown with 2:35 left and Gallant’s 31-yard field goal with 4.8 seconds remaining rallying them to a 15-14 semifinal victory over Mattanawcook Academy of Lincoln.

“If the kids had any doubt left, like there probably was in the last couple of minutes, that’s now erased and now we have a shot,” said O’Connell, a former player at Bangor High School and Bates College.

“We’re one game from being in a state title game. While we’ve talked about it a little bit, we told them everything would take care of itself if we won the games we needed to win,” he added. “We pulled this one out, and now we’re going to get ready for FA, and if nothing else, we’ll go up there ready to play and ready to try to win an Eastern Maine title.”

This run began last year when John Bapst earned its first playoff berth since 1997. A semifinal loss at Foxcroft ensued, but the Crusaders returned to the gridiron this fall with a veteran team and renewed resolve.

That resolve was tested during the first two weeks of the season with games against a Foxcroft team that has dominated the conference in recent years and a Mattanawcook team that reached the LTC final in 2005 and 2006.

A one-point loss at Foxcroft and a two-point win against MA left the Crusaders at 1-1 but also feeling they had truly had arrived back among the conference’s elite.

It’s a point they’ve proven every week since then.

“We didn’t know how good we really were when we played Foxcroft the last time,” said senior tailback Nick Smith, who has rushed for more than 1,000 yards each of the last two years. “We knew we had the talent, we just didn’t know how we would come out with it, and once we played them and then beat Mattanawcook the last time, we knew we had something special.”

State wrestling meets changed

This year’s high school wrestling state championships will be shifted from a single location to three different sites, one for each class.

During the offseason, the Maine Principals’ Association opted to change its recent practice of alternating a single state meet for all classes between the Augusta Civic Center and the Bangor Auditorium.

A single-day, all-class state wrestling meet will continue to be held every other year in Augusta, but instead of holding it in Bangor in alternating years it will be split among three sites.

Jeff Sturgis, MPA assistant executive director, said a reason for the change is that while the Augusta Civic Center floor is large enough to accommodate eight wrestling mats with plenty of room around the mats, the current Bangor Auditorium layout can hold only six mats with very little room between the mats and the building walls.

The fewer number of mats during an all-class meet at Bangor requires two days for the meet to be completed, with opening-round matches held on Friday and the remainder of the tournament held Saturday. That imposes additional costs on schools, coaches and athletes.

In addition, Sturgis said the Bangor facility has fewer rooms available for wrestler weigh-ins and coaches’ meetings.

Sturgis added that the MPA retains the hope of returning the event to Bangor in alternating years once a proposed new Bangor Auditorium is constructed that could accommodate eight mats and thus allow the competition to be held on a single day.

In recent years cheering and wrestling state championship events have alternated between Bangor and Augusta on the second Saturday in February, and cheering will continue to alternate between the Augusta Civic Center and the Bangor Auditorium, Sturgis said.

The 2008 state wrestling championship meets will be held at the following locations on Feb. 16 – Class A: Cony High School, Augusta; Class B: Mountain Valley High School, Rumford; Class C: Foxcroft Academy, Dover-Foxcroft.

Under the new schedule, the wrestling regular season will be extended by a week on years when the state meet is not scheduled in Augusta, enabling the state meet to be held a week closer to the New England championships, which traditionally are held in early March.

Under the previous scheduling, Maine qualifiers for the New Englands had nearly a month between the state meet and the New Englands.