In a hair-raising contest that could not have been any closer, Brewer boys’ basketball edged out Bangor 59-58 on Tuesday night.
With 6 seconds remaining, Bangor couldn’t get the ball down the floor fast enough to set up a shot, and Brewer held on for the one-point win.
The rivalry game had everything the impassioned student sections could have asked for: at least a dozen lead changes, a breakaway two-handed jam by Brewer’s Steven Youngs and a fourth quarter that featured two scoring runs of eight or more points.
Trailing 45-41 early in the fourth, Brewer used back-to-back threes from junior Charlie Brydges to suddenly retake a four-point lead, before Bangor emphatically retaliated with two steals and nine straight points to make it 58-57 with 1:14 remaining.
“It’s no quit on the guys,” Bangor head coach Brad Libby said. “[We] played with heart and energy. It was a dogfight out there. It came down to the little things.”
The Rams tried to slow the game down in the final minute, but their strategy backfired when Youngs poked the ball away from Bangor’s guards and used a breakaway lay-up to make it 59-58 Brewer.
Bangor tried fouling Brewer to take control of the ball, but with only one team foul at that point, it was too little, too late.
“We work all the time in practice on end-of-game scenarios, and it showed there,” Brydges said. “To beat them, especially after that grind all game, it felt really good.”
Senior Bangor forward — and former Brewer Witch — Ryan Ford led all scorers with 27 points. Bangor seniors Kamron Tardif and Ethan Beyeler also tacked on 11 and eight points, respectively.
In the Brewer camp, Youngs led the Witches with 23 points, while Brydges was the team’s best 3-point shooter, draining four. Down low, 6-foot-6 senior Cayen Philbrick was a menace on both ends, with three blocks, three offensive rebounds and six points in the first half.
Philbrick and forward Logan Littlefield teamed up to combine for eight put-back points in the first quarter, to help stretch out a 20-10 lead. Bangor made the adjustment in the second quarter, taking a 27-26 lead going into halftime.
“We started off with the intensity, but they wanted it just as bad as we did,” junior Brewer guard Ethan Leavitt said. “So they picked up their intensity, forced some bad plays and we battled it out from there.”
Bangor (0-2) and Brewer (1-1) will meet again on Jan. 9 in Bangor. The Rams haven’t beaten the Witches since early 2021.
“It hurts for sure — we thought we had it in the bag,” Ford said. “In the endgame, we got a little scatterbrained. We’re gonna get them back at home later in the season.”
