The crowd inside Presque Isle High School’s gym was swelling toward capacity Wednesday night before the start of the varsity boys basketball game.
Hundreds of Presque Isle fans crammed into the bleachers on both sides of the court, Caribou’s faithful — always large in number — piled in behind the away bench.
As the minutes ticked down in the JV game, the noise only got louder, and the varsity teams more wired in anticipation.
The Vikings looked on from a stairwell, the Wildcats peeked out from behind their locker room door. The sound of the crowd rose as the two varsity teams ran onto the court for warmups.
The gym got louder and louder as Presque Isle jumped out to an 8-0 lead, then a 20-point second half advantage.
When Presque Isle head coach Dillon Kingsbury stepped onto the court to pump them up with his Wildcats on the verge of one of biggest upsets in Maine high school basketball this season, the home fans did not need much encouragement. They were already in a frenzy.
Riding that wave, Presque Isle toppled Class C North leader Caribou 56-42, beating its bitter rival for the first time since 2023 and catapulting itself into a Class B playoff spot.
“I don’t think there’s a more proud coach in the state of Maine this morning than me,” Kingsbury said early Thursday. “We played with just such fire and passion and pure emotion.”
Chalk it up to the magic of Presque Isle-Caribou, a rivalry that runs so deep between Aroostook County’s biggest cities that it sits comfortably among Maine’s premier basketball matchups.
‘It really doesn’t get any better than this’
Presque Isle and Caribou high schools are 14 miles apart. Their cities, which share a roughly 6-mile border buffered by miles of farmland, make up the economic and population hubs of deeply agricultural central Aroostook.
Winters are long and cold. And when it’s 15 degrees and pitch black outside on a Wednesday night — as Caribou boys head coach Kyle Corrigan put it — “What else are you going to do at home?”
Everybody has a rivalry story. Georganna Curtis, a Wildcat senior, remembers watching Parker and Sawyer Deprey rule the court for Caribou in the midst of state championship seasons. Presque Isle junior Bodey McPherson recalled Malachi Cummings, a 1,000 point scorer for the Wildcats, put up 40 points in a losing effort to the Vikings.
“Basketball is really the heart and soul of both communities,” Krystal Flewelling, the Wildcat girls coach, said. “It’s not just the players and the coaches involved, it’s the town, it’s the church people, it’s the grandparents. The entire community — both communities — love basketball.”
The older the generation you talk to, the further back the memories go. The 2000s, the 90s, the 80s. Steve Condon. Monica Selander. An upset by Caribou. An upset by Presque Isle. Dominant stretches where one of the schools could not be beat.
The back-to-back state champion Wildcat girls of the early 2010s. The Viking boys that did the same in 2019 and 2020.
All that history pours back out when the cities’ ten best line up for tip-off on back-to-back nights, twice a year. And both communities come out in droves to see it.
“Just being in that atmosphere, seeing how many people were in the gym, it was honestly like the coolest thing I’ve ever done,” McPherson said.
The last few years, Caribou has swept the matchups. In the rivals’ first meetings of this season Tuesday and Wednesday, Presque Isle flipped the script on the Vikings.
It didn’t matter that both Caribou teams are the reigning Class B champions, nor that the Viking boys entered the game 9-1 to Presque’s Isle’s 6-5. The Wildcats were victorious both nights in highly competitive matchups.
“No matter what, it’s always going to be a dog fight,” Owen Corrigan, an offensive stalwart for Caribou, said of the rivalry.
The Wildcat girls (8-4, 7th in Class B North) stopped Caribou (6-5, 6th in Class C North) 49-38 on Tuesday behind 19 points from Georganna Curtis and 14 from her sister, Lenora.
“You could be having the best season ever and maybe the other team might not be, but when we come to meet up, it’s gonna be a heck of a game and one that you don’t want to miss,” said Caribou girls coach MacKenzie Turner.
It also didn’t seem to matter that the Vikings dropped down to Class C under last year’s Maine Principals’ Association reclassification. The schools have a roughly 40-student difference in enrollment. The product on the basketball court has not changed.
“They could be in Class D or we could be in Class A and I don’t think that rivalry is ever going to skip a beat,” Kingsbury said.
The games still have real tournament implications. The Presque Isle boys upset over the top team in Class C North was worth over four times more than any of their other wins this season in the Heal Point Standings.
But on Wednesday, as the Presque Isle hockey team stormed the locker room to celebrate with their classmates, the Wildcats were more focused on the present.
“I’ve been waiting all four years of my high school career to beat Caribou,” senior Eli Mosher said. “That just saves up all that excitement into one moment. It feels pretty great.”
And why shouldn’t they be? On a weekday night, in the dead of winter, in one of the most rural counties in the continental U.S. — there is nothing better. Take it all in.
“You’ve got to take advantage of these moments, win or lose,” Corrigan said. “Soak in the atmosphere, because it really doesn’t get any better than this.”