Every senior wants to see his team finish with a flourish, and Andrew Wendell is no exception. On Monday afternoon, the lanky youth from Deer Isle-Stonington High School stepped off the plane at Bangor International Airport proudly clutching the second-place trophy his team won at the National Chess Tournament in Dearborn, Mich., Sunday.

Family members cheered as they greeted Wendell and his teammates — junior Richard Larrabee and freshmen Wade Dunham, Aaron Nevells and Dylan Grant. That was just the beginning. The five were scheduled for a motorcade and reception on Deer Isle as soon as they could get back to the island.

“We were all excited, jumping up and down,” Wendell said of the boys’ reaction when they realized they were probably going to be runners-up out of 97 teams at the 1,300-and-under rated tournament in Dearborn, Mich.

“I feel humble to do as well as we did,” said Dick Powell, filling in for Chris Keefe as coach on the trip. Deer Isle-Stonington beat out last year’s runner-up, a school from Hope, R.I., to take the second-place trophy. First place went to a school in Philadelphia.

Powell, who teaches French at Deer Isle-Stonington, had been the chess coach for six years and has watched the students improve. “I tried to get them to play during lunchtime,” he said.

Some of the youngsters actually started playing in elementary school. “We’d get the high school kids to come down during their activity period” to play the younger pupils, said Bonnie Grant, fifth-grade teacher and mother of Dylan Grant. Her class members were thrilled with the news on Monday, she said. “They knew everybody.”

The students left on Thursday and then had a very busy weekend, playing twice on Friday, three times on Saturday, and twice Sunday. They were up until 3:30 a.m. each day, Wendell said.

Some of the players didn’t get a chance to call their families from Michigan, but Aaron Nevells called to let his parents know that the team had placed second.

That was the important thing. They didn’t find out until he got off the plane Monday that their son had placed first among the students with an under-1000 rating.

There were other individual honors as well. Wade Dunham placed second nationally in the ninth-grade-and-under category.

Richard Larrabee, who played last year in the national competition, tied for fifth place overall this year with several other youngsters, which gave him the 15th-place trophy among the several hundred players.

“In the last round, I was really nervous,” Larrabee said.

Before another year comes around, there may well be many nervous youngsters not looking forward to playing Deer Isle-Stonington in another national tournament. After all, four of the five players are underclassmen and will back at the boards next year.

They’ll have plenty of time to enjoy their achievements and practice for another season, and they’ll still have that special quality that helped them exceed most people’s expectations this year. As parent Penny Wendell put it, “They believed enough in themselves.”