LEWISTON — Either Thornton Academy’s C.J. Maksut scored, or a locomotive plowed into the south end of Androscoggin Bank Colisee.

Twenty sticks and helmets shot heavenward. Their white-jerseyed owners raced to an imaginary yet seemingly preordained meeting place at center ice, as if somebody told the Trojans that the Zamboni crew buried a winning Powerball ticket there.

One spectator’s plastic Gatorade bottle soared 50 feet toward the ceiling, nearly kissing the photographers’ catwalk above center ice. Not that anyone would have heard the hollow collision. By then, 1,500-or-so Sacovians had turned into Space Mountain passengers or prepubescent Justin Bieber worshippers.

Student managers decked out in suits and ties forgot that skates weren’t a part of that get-up and took YouTube-quality diggers, rising to their feet with mile-wide smiles intact.

Players feverishly flipped through the mental Rolodex, trying to figure out whom they hadn’t yet hugged. Coaches followed that same pattern in the butt-slap category.

Back at the scene of the crime, Thornton’s elation and ebullience morphed into Lewiston’s exhaustion and exasperation. Heads and knees crashed to the ice in tearful unison. Helmets were dropped. Sticks, slammed.

Thornton won the Class A hockey championship — its first, doubtful its last — Saturday night when Maksut’s deflection of a shot by Sam Canales made the Trojans triumphant, 4-3, with 1:27 remaining in the second overtime.

For Lewiston, it means at least a full decade will elapse between the Blue Devils’ 20th and 21st titles. Lewiston has skated onto this stage multiple times since its last hoisting of the hardware in 2002, each close shave concluding with similar heartbreak.

Win or lose, it was a story the combatants will share with their fraternity brothers in five years, their wives in 10, their kids in 20, their grandchildren in 40, their nurses in 60.

Call it sudden-death. Call it sudden-victory, if the last century’s language offends your ears. Just call it sudden. And in this case, sudden is sensational.

Hockey has it right.

High school sports have a hundred different means for breaking ties. Most of them are more concerned with making everything fit into a pretty, little box than creating the best possible experience for the kids.

Maine is the state, after all, in which more than one football conference lacking a round-robin schedule separates three-way deadlocks for playoff position with a coin flip, via conference call.

On game day, the sports generally fall in lockstep with national federation guidelines, most of which embrace convenience rather than reward excellence.

Stalemated soccer games are subject to abbreviated overtime periods — and they’ve been both cut and compressed over the years — before advancing to penalty kicks.

Yes, they’re about as exciting as it sounds. Each team chooses its five players with the strongest feet, and they get an uncontested shot against the goalie from 12 yards away.

It is electric bug zapper versus firefly. Microwave against popsicle. The team enjoying the most prolific practice drill gets credit for a goal and “wins.”

Field hockey engages in a couple of token, eight-minute, seven-on-seven overtime sessions before its last resort of penalty corners. If taking players off the field doesn’t change the entire fabric of a game, confining it to a rectangle at the end of the field surely does.

Football? Self-professed toughest of all games? Bastion of warlike terminology and imagery? They give each team four downs from the 10-yard line. Sure, let’s smack each other around for two hours and then eliminate offense, defense and most of special teams from the equation.

Tennis has third-set tiebreakers. Basketball, with both teams usually well past the seven-foul bonus barrier, becomes a free-throw shooting contest.

Even baseball, the game forever governed without a clock, is a shadow of its majestic self in high school extra innings. Pitching staffs are burned up. The supply of pinch runners and defensive replacements, depleted.

Thank you, hockey — the most physically demanding game on the planet, its apologists would argue correctly — for allowing the game to end under the same circumstances it began.

We could have been here 43 seconds, as were York and Brewer before the Wildcats won the Class B title in extended time earlier Saturday. Or we could have been here all weekend.

Thornton and Lewiston settled it somewhere in the middle, after nearly 15 grueling overtime minutes and a third intermission.

There was no contrived game of three-on-three. No (hell, no) whispers of a shootout.

Overtime in playoff hockey is simply the third period brought to you by Spinal Tap, with the volume turned up to 11.

Every change of possession is drowned out by a deafening roar. Each save looks acrobatic. All contact ends with the perceived victim taking a dive, followed by nary a whistle.

The kids and their conditioning and their persistence decide it.

Just as Lewiston’s Mario Villani did in 2002, when he skated in alone and fired the winning salvo in triple-overtime. Just as Maksut and Canales did Saturday.

Loud, proud and straight-up. No shortcuts. No excuses. No better way.

Kalle Oakes is a staff columnist. His email is koakes@sunjournal.com.