When the Lewiston High School Blue Devils boys’ soccer crew gained a state championship, they introduced pleasure to a neighborhood that was rocked by a mass capturing in late October.

Russ Dillingham /Sun Journal through AP

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Russ Dillingham /Sun Journal through AP

When the Lewiston High School Blue Devils boys’ soccer crew gained a state championship, they introduced pleasure to a neighborhood that was rocked by a mass capturing in late October.

Russ Dillingham /Sun Journal through AP

Last month, police used the highschool car parking zone in Lewiston, Maine, as a staging space within the manhunt for a mass assassin. Today, Lewiston High School is celebrating a state championship, after its boys’ soccer crew gained a nail-biter in time beyond regulation, 3-2, over the weekend.

“We just wanted to give back to the city with all they have gone through,” the Lewiston Blue Devils’ Tegra Mbele advised the Sun Journal newspaper.

As goalie Payson Goyette put it, “We have been saying the past few weeks, ‘Do it for the city.’ ”

The metropolis is grateful: Lewiston thanked the crew for bringing “great joy to our hearts” on its Facebook page.

A late objective settles an intense title matchup

Mbele scored the primary objective of the sport, but it surely was his breakaway objective with only a bit over a minute left in time beyond regulation that despatched the group into euphoria. The rating sealed a back-and-forth showdown with Deering High School within the Class A state championship.

The Blue Devils threaded a properly weighted cross by means of Deering’s central protection — and when Mbele caught as much as it on the proper aspect, he calmly flipped the ball previous the Rams’ sliding goalie and contained in the far publish for the win.

Following custom, the Lewiston squad celebrated their win by gathering collectively on the sphere, earlier than dashing at their followers within the stands for embraces and high-fives.

“What a journey that will never be forgotten,” coach Dan Gish said on Monday through X, previously Twitter.

The emotional win got here simply 17 days after Lewiston was gripped by horror, plunged into lockdown after a gunman killed 18 folks at a bowling alley and a bar.

Those killed included Lucy Violette, 73, who labored as a secretary for Lewiston Public Schools for greater than 50 years. She and her husband, Bob, died on the bowling alley the place they’d lengthy been integral to a youth league.

Somali neighborhood helps to uplift Lewiston

When the soccer crew returned to the sphere after final month’s violence, Gish and his gamers embraced the “Lewiston Strong” motto taken up by the college and neighborhood because it copes with final month’s tragedy.

The title is the Blue Devils’ fourth state championship previously decade — an increase to excellence that has been linked to Lewiston turning into a brand new residence to Somali refugees and immigrants within the early 2000s.

The folks and the city sorely wanted one another: When lots of of Somalis started to reach in Lewiston, the city’s housing emptiness price stood at 20 %, as then-University of Maine sociologist Kimberly Huisman Lubreski wrote in 2011.

“I believe we saved Lewiston,” Fatuma Hussein, who moved to the city in 2001, said in August.

The path was typically bumpy, Hussein mentioned. But in 2015, the highschool soccer crew’s drive to a long-sought state title mirrored the profitable melding of an inflow of younger Africans right into a mill city with deeply French-Canadian roots and a love for hockey.

The story even impressed a e-book, One Goal, by Amy Bass, a professor of sport research and chair of the division of social science and communication at Manhattanville College.

A fairy story, or future?

“Fairy tales do happen!” the Blue Devils’ athletics division declared after Saturday’s win.

Bass additionally invoked that phrase, forward of the ultimate.

“It is, indeed, a bit of a fairy tale, because fairy tales are not just about living happily ever after” and saving the day, Bass mentioned on member station Northeast Public Radio.

“Fairy tales are also dark, with horrific details — the original versions of Charles Perrault’s ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ and Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘Little Mermaid’ come to mind — that offer us warnings about the world we live in, and the terrible people we may have to combat.”

Those tales function cautionary tales, Bass famous.

“But then, again, fairy tales remind us that amidst the dark, there is the good, the happily ever after, the saving of the day. Sport, too, often feels like that.”

And in Lewiston, she added, the soccer crew’s newest success felt like greater than saving the day. It felt, she mentioned, like future.