BANGOR — A year ago, the Winslow boys soccer team beat John Bapst 2-0 to win the Class B North title.
On Wednesday night, the Crusaders got their revenge.
Led by goals Jack Mason and Garrett Fletcher, No. 1 John Bapst beat No. 2 Winslow 2-0 for the B North championship at Cameron Stadium. The Crusaders (16-0-1) will meet B South champion Yarmouth on Saturday in the Class B title game at Hampden Academy.
“It feels amazing,” Mason said. “We’ve been working hard for this all season. We had it as a goal in mind, thought it was achievable. Here we are.”
Winslow finished 15-1-1.
John Bapst took a 1-0 lead just four minutes into play when Mason, a senior, moved down the left sideline and managed to rattle a shot off the inside of the far post and into the net.
“I just tried to stay calm, ball at my feet, in the box in that situation, I just had to stay calm, put it on target,” Mason said.
The Crusaders sealed the game with 7:35 left in the second half when Fletcher, a junior, received a pass and raced down the sideline, slipping a shot past Winslow goalkeeper Jason Reynolds before falling out of bounds for the final 2-0 score.
Winslow’s Braden Laramee, right, and John Bapst’s Jon Pangburn battle for the ball during the Class B North final Wednesday in Bangor. Rich Abrahamson/Morning Sentinel
John Bapst kept the offensive pressure consistently on Winslow throughout the match, showing quick footwork and strong passing.
Defensively, the Crusaders successfully marked Winslow’s leading scorer, senior Andrew Poulin, using two and sometimes three players at a time.
“(Poulin) is just so dangerous, a 100-goal (career) scorer,” John Bapst head coach Jason Pangburn said. “He’s so fast and explosive. We watched him against Ellsworth (in the semifinals), when he scored those two goals and almost had a third, he’s so quick. We definitely spent some time talking about him and how we wanted to defend him and how it really needed to be a team effort, because he’s so good, you can’t just put one guy on him. I felt my guys in the back, they switched around a little bit, they communicated and always knew where he was.”
Despite this, Poulin still had Winslow’s two closest chances at breaking through, a shot that ricocheted off the post late in the first half, and a rebound off a free kick midway through the second half that resulted in a diving save by John Bapst keeper Matt Fitzpatrick. The Black Raiders did an excellent job keeping potential scoring opportunities away from the next, but struggled to turn the pressure back on the Crusaders offensively.
“I kind of expected (Poulin to be heavily marked),” Winslow head coach Aaron Wolfe said. “We’ve had teams do similar things, but just not have the quality (of play) that John Bapst has to be able to do it. We kind of expected that. I just thought that we didn’t connect enough passes to allow us to do what we wanted to do.”
Poulin finished with 50 goals this season, just two shy of tying the state record, set by Damon Warren of Sumner in 2018.
“At this point, just getting here, I was extremely proud, win or lose,” Wolfe said. “It was just going to be what it was. I think in this case, Bapst was just the better team, they deserved to win.”
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