PORTLAND — Believe the hype. Maine had four excellent Class B football teams this fall.

Any given Friday night or Saturday afternoon — sorry, old timers who believe that Class A is the be-all, end-all — they could clobber most of their big brethren from Bangor to Biddeford.

Three of them occupy Androscoggin, Franklin and Oxford counties, so yes, you’ve heard plenty about them.

Two dominated headlines and highlight films statewide for accumulating yards and points at a dizzying pace. To Leavitt and Mt. Blue, sincere thanks for the memories and the entertainment value.

One, situated 90 minutes to the south, merely made off with the Gold Ball.

“I knew this was going to happen when I spent all summer in the weight room,” Wells senior tackle Andrew Staples said. “I didn’t know I was going to cry over it.”

Staples’ senior-dominated team won the state title Saturday night, outlasting Leavitt, 21-13, at Fitzpatrick Stadium.

The Warriors did it with offensive sensibilities borrowed from a day when boys were trained not to cry.

Wells’ Wing-T owned the clock and owned the night. And now, for the first time in 14 years, the Warriors own the trophy that so many of us in the alleged know had conceded months ago to one of those newfangled, neighboring, dare-we-say-it more exciting teams.

“Our style of play can be a little boring after a while,” Wells quarterback Paul McDonough acknowledged. “We just run it down the middle and run it down the middle. But when we need to open it up, we can.”

Opened it up? More like shut it down.

Leavitt forced two first-half turnovers and escaped into the locker room knotted at seven.

Between the pep talk and the marching bands and the 2:34 mark of the fourth quarter, the Hornets ran a grand total of nine offensive plays.

Nine, as in single digits. As in agonizing.

“They got a good push up front,” Leavitt coach Mike Hathaway said. “We didn’t tackle exceptionally well today. Their backs are good, and when we did jam it up on the front side, they found some good cutback lanes. They were controlling the clock.”

Stopping the Wing-T is simple as containing four basic plays: Dive, sweep, counter and waggle.

No shovel passes, inside handoffs or bubble screens here. Wells’ idea of spicing it up is mixing in a counter criss cross straight out of a century-old Harvard-Yale game on third-and-long.

Easy stuff to defend, until you factor in the physical strength of the guys in your cross hairs.

McDonough isn’t fancy, but he’s elusive as a booger on a frostbitten fingertip.

Fullback Louis DiTomasso isn’t setting any land speed records, but he’s never going down from the first contact. Or the second. Or usually the third.

There were no incomplete passes to stop the clock. No sacks to serve up second-and-a-mile or third-and-a-marathon.

“I looked up at the end of the third quarter and said, ‘Is that really right?’ It was right,” Wells coach Tim Roche said.

Or maybe it was left, as in the direction McDonough repeatedly ran on the unapologetically 1950s bootleg that moved the chains one and two and a half-dozen times.

McDonough and DiTomasso combined for 26 carries, 114 yards and both Wells touchdowns in the second half, relegating Leavitt‘s offense to the roster of 5,000 spectators.

Hornets time of possession in that span: Six minutes, 11 seconds.

“I just knew looking at them. Paulie McDonough said to me, ‘Give me the damn ball. Give me the ball and let’s go.’ I’m like, ‘OK.’ We were in the wrong formation the first time we scored, so give the coach credit, right? But still the kid made the play.”

Playmaking in our neck of the woods became so commonplace and so clever this autumn that we were spoiled and lulled to sleep.

Leavitt and Mt. Blue made a mockery of the Pine Tree Conference, scoring 40 to 50 points per game when they could have put up 100 without blinking.

Together they gave us two donnybrooks that won’t be forgotten even decades from now, when the participants are feeling the arthritic aftereffects.

And Mountain Valley was, well, just Mountain Valley, rushing for more than 3,000 yards as a team and hitting the daylights out of anything in its path.

Maybe it was the Falcons whose encounters with the Warriors should have given us a clue. Wells out-mountained and out-valleyed its longtime tormentor, 28-12 in October and 10-0 in November, all while employing a style that tends to prosper at this time of year.

“We just started pounding it down their throat,” Staples said. “That’s the B West, right there.”

Wells jams to Kenny Chesney and borrows its conditioning program from the Navy SEALs. The Warriors are old school meets the new reality.

They are beachfront kids with farm and mill town toughness.

They’re the survivor of a two-week, Class B battle royal, and they’re probably one of the two best teams in the entire state.

Believe that.

— Kalle Oakes is a staff columnist. His email is [email protected].