IN THESE GIRLS, HOPE IS A MUSCLE: A True Story of Hoop Dreams and One Very Special Team, by Madeleine Blais; Warner Books, New York, 266 pages, $11.99 (paperback).

Tourney fever in Maine anyone? Take another New England rural town, bigger than Orono, but not that different from Orono, Bar Harbor or Bucksport in temperament and spirit. The Amherst, Mass., Lady Hurricanes made winter bearable in 1993. As in Maine communities, the fervor and support for a special group of teen-age athletes who happened to be young women was about more than a sport. Like the author, “a sports virgin,” I came to realize this after being immersed in the lives of Jen Pariseau and Jamila Wideman, stars who knew how to be part of a team.

It was senior year for both of these young women. Jamila had played on the high school team since seventh grade. When the local newspaper predicted Amherst would take a third or fourth spot in the region, Jen’s response was, “You’re kidding, right?” During the early minutes of the first home game of the 1992-93 season, action stopped as she scored her thousandth career point amidst a roar of hometown cheers. The cheering never stopped for the rest of the season.

After college, Coach Moyer came to Amherst, where his sweetheart had grown up and graduated from Amherst High School. “Would Emily Dickinson be a potential Hurricane if she were alive today?” he once quipped. His players were introspective and strong, poetry in motion to his eyes. A rival coach once told him: “The girls are fun to coach. Boys are often sometimes there just for the ride. Girls, they tend to appreciate it more.” Coach Moyer replied: “They listen. Boys, you have to tear down their ego. With girls, you just have to build up their confidence.”

A favorite Lady Hurricane activity was to invite guys at the University of Massachusetts gym to shoot baskets with them. After a while, eye-rolling generally turned to the question, “You two home from college on a break?” not realizing they were playing against a high school all-American. “Jamila understood the fine line between being cocky and being sure of yourself, and she danced it with style.”

When it came to tournament time in Amherst, teachers at Jen’s old elementary school planned to honor her with “Jen Pariseau Day,” no matter what the outcome. Some mothers remembered the days when to be a cheerleader was the ultimate female sport. Jamila’s father told Kathleen’s father, “This is just one team in one season. It alone cannot change the discrimination against girls and their bodies throughout history. But here in these girls, hope is a muscle. This is as good as it gets.”

Sure, this is about winning a state basketball tournament. It’s also about pride, and belonging to a community:

“You have to live in a small town for a while before you can read a crowd, especially in New England, where reticence and fences are deep in the soil. But if you’ve been in a town like Amherst for a while, you can go to an out-of-town game, even to one in as imposing and cavernous a facility as the Centrum (or the Bangor Auditorium), and you can feel this sudden lurch of well-being that comes from the soothing familiarity of faces that are as much a part of your landscape as falling leaves, as forsythia in season, as rhubarb in June.” As Maine in the winter.

Sheila Wilensky-Lanford owns OZ Books in Southwest Harbor.