Somewhere in Maine right now there is a grown man in a basement with two monitors, a cold coffee and a spreadsheet with forty one tabs. He has not seen daylight since the first whistle in August. Food gets left outside the door. He calls this a hobby.
That is not a metaphor. That is roughly the arrangement.
We are the gremlins. We work twenty three hours a day and spend the twenty fourth thinking about conditional formatting. Nobody asked us to do this. We have day jobs, mortgages, and in at least two cases spouses who have started referring to the fall season as "the thing."
If you have read Meet The Gremlins, you know there is no company here. A handful of people, a group chat that would not survive a subpoena, and a shared conviction that a Class D volleyball match in Blue Hill deserves the same arithmetic as a Class A game in Portland.
Here is what the numbers are actually saying.
What A Fall Weeknight Looks Like In Here
Five sports running at once. Games finishing all over the state between six and nine. A chat that goes from silent to two hundred messages in about forty minutes and then does not stop.
Somebody is arguing about a class designation. Somebody else has found a score that cannot possibly be right and will not let it go. A third gremlin, who has an actual job in the morning and an actual family asleep upstairs, has opened a pivot table at an hour when no reasonable adult opens a pivot table, and has announced he is not going to bed until the number makes sense.
The sentence that ruins a night around here is that number is wrong, here is why. It has been typed into that chat more this fall than in any season we have run. Somebody always goes and finds it. Always. That is the entire job, and we do it after everyone else has gone to bed, because that is when the games are finished and the numbers finally sit still long enough to be counted.
By the time you are pouring a coffee, every rating, every standing and every projection on this site has been torn down and rebuilt. Not edited. Rebuilt. None of it existed the night before.
We are not well. We are, however, extremely current.
The Fall So Far
812 games played since the first whistle on August 19. Soccer has 491 of them, field hockey 138, volleyball 108, football 75. Cross country has put 2,414 race results on the board from 1,444 runners at 86 schools across 19 days of meets.
That is the scale. Now the interesting part.
Soccer has been a knife fight
491 games, 2,308 goals, and a season that refuses to settle. 142 of those games were decided by a single goal. Another 30 finished level. Better than one game in three came down to one goal or never got decided at all.
And then there is the stat that stopped the group chat cold: 249 of 491 soccer games had a shutout in them. Fifty one percent. Half the soccer played in Maine this fall has ended with somebody's keeper walking off with a clean sheet.
Those two facts should not sit next to each other. A league of one goal games is usually a league of 2-1 finishes, not clean sheets. What we are actually watching is a season with a very wide floor: a lot of extremely tight games between good sides, and a lot of games where one team simply never got going.
39 teams out of 249 have not lost yet. Sumner's girls are 5-0-0. So are Mount Abram's girls. Poland's girls are 5-0-1. Maranacook's boys are 5-0, and Piscataquis Community's boys are 5-0 in the 8-Person ranks.
Field hockey is even more decisive
138 games, 840 goals, and not one draw all season. Not a single one. 30 games were one-goal games, and 74 of the 138, fifty four percent, had a shutout in them.
Fifteen teams are still unbeaten, three of them at a clean 5-0: Mount Ararat and Camden Hills in Class A, Yarmouth in Class B.
Volleyball is the wildest sport we have
108 matches in, only five teams unbeaten: George Stevens Academy at 5-0 in Class D, with Lewiston/Lisbon and Gorham both 4-0 in Class A.
Volleyball is also the sport that has beaten us up the most this fall, which we will get to in a minute.
Football is still shuffling
75 games, which is about two apiece. Not one of the 78 programs has separated yet in a way the numbers can defend. Ask us again in three weeks. We will have something to say then and we do not now, and saying so is the whole job.
Cross country is fast this year
Both of the state's best 5K times so far came out of the same afternoon at the Southern Maine Classic. Atticus Merriam of Scarborough went 15:45.8. Karen Higgins of Lincoln Academy went 18:07.0, and she owns two of the five quickest girls runs on the board.
Every one of those 2,414 results is on All Runners, including the ones from the back of the pack, because a kid who ran 28:40 in the rain still ran it.
Where We Have Been Wrong
We grade ourselves in public, which is an uncomfortable habit and the only honest one.
Across soccer, field hockey and volleyball, GameIQ has called 435 of 583 games correctly this fall. That is 74.6 percent. Broken out:
Girls soccer: 164 of 204, 80.4 percent. Our best work this fall.
Field hockey: 84 of 107, 78.5 percent.
Boys soccer: 136 of 196, 69.4 percent.
Volleyball: 51 of 76, 67.1 percent. Nearly a third of matches went against us.
The worst single miss of the fall: on September 11, Ellsworth's girls beat Bucksport 2-0 in soccer. We had Bucksport at 94 percent. That is not a coin flip we lost. That is a game we did not understand, and it is sitting on the Report Card with our name on it where anyone can find it.
There were others. Lee beat Dexter 3-2 with Dexter at 93 percent. In volleyball, Ellsworth beat Mount Desert Island 3-0 with MDI at 90 percent.
We would rather print the 67 than hide it. The 67 is what makes the 80 worth anything.
Why Any Of This
A parent in Fort Kent can open The Slate at 6 AM and see that their daughter's team won at 9:40 the night before. A coach can pull Heal Points and see exactly where a seed is going before anyone announces it. A grandfather who stopped driving years ago can find his granddaughter's 5K on a leaderboard with her name spelled right.
None of that happens unless somebody is awake, in a room, with the door shut, getting the arithmetic right.
So we will be up again tonight. Five sports, 2,075 games still left on the fall schedule, and a group chat that is going to go off at 9:15 whether we feel like it or not.
Somebody tell our families we said hello.
Bring on October.
The numbers in this piece are current through the games of Tuesday, September 16 and the cross country meets of Saturday, September 12.