PORTLAND, Maine — To get a sense of what high school basketball was like in the small towns of Maine back in the 1970s, it helps to have a mental picture of the gyms of that era. Often cramped and rundown, they were about as no-frills as they come.

Consider the Hartland gym. “There was a bed mattress nailed to the stage at one end of the court to protect players from running into it,” Dave Albee wrote in his new book, “ The Last One Out of Town Turn Out the Lights .” “It had the look of a garage sale.”

The ceiling of the Harmony gym “was so low that players had to change the trajectory of their field goal attempts. It was like shooting in a toll booth.”

And then there was Athens, whose gym was inside the town’s fire station, with two fire trucks parked just off the court. One frigid w

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