BANGOR – Will the future of the Mount Desert Island girls basketball team be as bright as its recent past?

With four sophomores and two juniors back from the Trojans’ rotation, coach Chip Taylor thinks so, and that’s one of the reasons he emptied his bench at the end of Saturday’s Eastern Maine Class B girls final at the Bangor Auditorium.

“I wanted to get [the younger players] a little bit of feel on the floor that last two minutes,” Taylor said after the 49-36 loss to Winslow. “… We accomplished a lot of things and obviously we’re disappointed that we lost but we respect [Winslow] and we’ll take this and build on it for next year.”

The Trojans, who won three Class B state titles from 2001 to 2003, didn’t make it to the Auditorium last year.

MDI will return just one starter, sophomore Kelsey Stratton, but sophomore Sue Falt played a lot of minutes off the bench this season. Taylor feels it’s a good nucleus with which to make another run in 2005-06 and beyond.

And nobody can take away the week MDI had, including two exciting buzzer-beater wins in the quarterfinals and semifinals.

“No matter what anybody says, those first two games of the tournament, when you go back into the archives, I don’t think you’re going to find two better games that ended that way,” Taylor said.