GORHAM — After a nine-year wait and plenty of close calls over the past few seasons, it looked like the Thornton Academy girls indoor track team was finally going to take home its seventh state title at the Class A state championship meet Monday.

But in the most agonizing of circumstances, it just slipped through their collective grasps.

The Golden Trojans came as close to the top as possible, but in the end Bangor nipped them 70.5 to 70, in a meet that literally came down to hundredths of seconds and quarters of inches at the University of Southern Maine Field House.

Favored coming in due to their superior overall depth and a dominating performance two weeks ago at the Southwesterns meet, it was the second time in two years Thornton has finished as runner-up, and the third time in four years the Trojans have come within at least five points of the title.

“It does get tiring being the bridesmaid all the time,” said Thornton girls coach Lisa Huntress. “I guess it’s bittersweet. We came to perform and we did, and I honestly came in thinking that if a team was going to win, they were going to have to get into the 70s, and we did.

“Sure, you’d like to leave as the winners, but being state runner-up isn’t too bad either.”

With the Rams leading the Trojans by the half a point and Bonny Eagle by 2 1/2, the girls meet looked like it would come down to a showdown in the 4×200 meter relay, the 14th and final event.

But due to athletes being able to enter only three events each at the state meet, all three schools were forced to go deep within their rosters for the decider, including three freshmen and a sophomore for Thornton. That ended up hurting the Trojans, which had a couple of mistimed baton handoffs and finished 11th.

Both Bangor and Bonny Eagle finished out of the points, too, but the status quo was enough to earn the Rams their first-ever state.

“It’s awesome,” said Bangor senior Grace MacLean. “I’ve been waiting for four years, and we finally got it done.”

MacLean was the biggest part of getting it done, winning the high jump, long jump and 55-meter hurdles to score the maximum 30 points for her team.

But what really made the difference for Bangor was the pole vault, where the Rams finished in four of the top five positions for a massive 26.5 points.

“To think that they scored 26.5 points in the pole vault, that’s just huge,” Huntress said. “MacLean and the pole vaulters ”“ that was pretty impressive.”

While MacLean and the pole vaulters did the majority of the damage for the Rams, Thornton relied on its depth to piece together its 70 points as 10 different Trojans scored in 11 of the 12 individual events.

Charlotte Pierce was the Trojan’s lone individual champion, winning the mile in a time of 5:06.33, nearly 10 seconds faster than second-place Angelyn Masters of Bangor.

Pierce also finished fourth in the 800 meter and second in the two mile, the latter of which brought Thornton within half a point of Bangor heading into the 4×200-meter run.

Pierce had been seeded nearly five seconds faster than Cheverus’ Kiera Murray in the two mile, but the Stags freshman, running in her first event of the day to Pierce’s third, sprinted in the final half of a lap for the victory.

“I was tripling for the team, definitely,” Pierce said. “I tried going a little bit earlier to kind of open it up more, but I didn’t have it at the end.”

Huntress said she had no regrets of having her senior captain run in all three distance events.

“Someone asked me if it was a good decision,” Huntress said. “But if you look at it, if she only ran the mile and the two mile, the most would have been 20 points, and she ended up scoring 24 points. So we did have to max that. I thought Charlotte did an excellent job of handling it.”

Juniors Amanda Arnold and Carly McKenna, and sophomore Tori Daigle, also all scored in each three of their events for the Trojans, scoring 32 points between them. Arnold was second in the long jump and sixth in both the triple jump and 55-meter hurdles. McKenna placed third in the long jump, sixth in the high jump and seventh in the 55-meter hurdles, and Daigle finished third in the 55-meter hurdles, fifth in the 55-meter dash and sixth in the 200-meter dash. On the boys side, the meet also went down to the wire with two-time defending state champs Scarborough using a late one-two finish in the pole vault to squeak by Cheverus 61-57. The Thornton boys team finished a strong seventh overall with 25.5 points, led by sophomore Andrew Smith’s second-place finish in the long jump, and senior David LePauloue’s third place in the shot put on the field side, along with sophomore Derek Boissonnault and Ryan Cadorette’s fourth-place finishes in the 55-meter dash and two mile, respectively, on the track.

Like the Thornton girls team, Biddeford’s James Ociti was a hard-luck second-place finisher in the boys 400-meter dash. The sprinter ran a 50.26, breaking the old state record by .11 of a second, but was beaten to the line by Brunswick senior Alex Nichols, who ran a blistering 49.93 to become the first boy in the state’s history to break 50 seconds.

Ociti was also sixth in the 55-meter dash as he scored 10 of the team’s 14 total points, with the rest coming from Justin Gagnon’s fourth in the 55-meter hurdles, as the Tigers’ finished 14th in the team scores.

“It was good to break the record, but I felt like I didn’t really go all out, that’s the bad part,” Ociti said of the 400. “I slowed down around the corner and then as (Nichols) passed me, I started building up speed and momentum.

“But it was a good race, I had a pretty good day overall.”

Just a junior, Ociti will have another chance at a state title next year, as will the Thornton girls, who graduate only two of its points-scorers from the state meet. One of those, Pierce, will be hard to replace, but Huntress said Monday’s disappointment would only fuel the fire.

“We’re still a young team,” Huntress said. “You’ll see it, they’ll be coming. We graduated two seniors this year so we sure believe we’re coming back with a vengeance.”

— Contact Staff Writer Cameron Dunbar at 282-1535, Ext. 323.