Grown men have some farkakte notions about how to challenge children.

It could be worse, I suppose. Too many adults are afraid to challenge kids at all. Unfortunately, anyone who tries to swing the pendulum the other way finds themselves allied with macho men who whisper their critiques to each other at  Saturday breakfast meetings or get their manhood from anonymous message board handles, behind which they decry what they consider the wussification of America.

Sports is all about challenges, so naturally the concept gets warped once adults get involved. In high school football, the construct of challenging a teenager to line up across from someone bigger, stronger and/or faster, or to lead his team 99 yards to the game-winning touchdown, or to ignore his fatigue and pain to gain one more yard gets lumped in with ignoble pursuits created by those more interested in, uh, testosterone level measuring contests than building character.

It’s too early to declare the Maine Principals’ Association’s decision to add a fourth class to high school football a complete success. Friday and Saturday’s entertaining trio of compelling state championship games are a pretty good place to start.

Unfortunately, the fourth and final game, Leavitt’s 47-18 blowout of Winslow in the Class C title game, will only lead to sour grapes from some adults with screwy ideas of what really constitutes a challenge.

The MPA’s football bulletin lists Leavitt’s enrollment at 596, a full house backfield below the Class C cutoff of 599. Two Eastern C schools, Camden Hills and Nokomis, exceed that. Both petitioned down and were ineligible for the playoffs. Belfast (580), Waterville (573) and Western C opponent Lake Region (569) are within a full football squad of the Hornets.

A pair of Leavitt’s Campbell Conference rivals, Mountain Valley and Wells (pop. 395 and 434, respectively) petitioned up from Class D for the two-year cycle. Those two proud programs are the most-often cited examples of schools and football programs “challenging” their kids by playing a class above their enrollment. Both did the same thing the last two years under the old three-class format, petitioning up to Class B.

Wells won a Class B title in 2011 and was a regional semifinalist as a No. 2 seed this year. Declining enrollment has hit Mountain Valley harder, and the Falcons have won four games in two years.

Both Tim Roche and Jim Aylward carefully weighed declining numbers and considered the long-term health of their football programs and what was best for Maine high school football when they made their decisions.

Leavitt coach Mike Hathaway and the powers that be at Leavitt put the same careful thought into their decision. Yes, the Hornets were a Class B powerhouse the previous five years. Their school district has enjoyed a remarkable succession of exceptional athletes that carried over into the 19 seniors on this year’s team.

Hathaway figured the Hornets would enjoy those riches this year, but what lies ahead of their dominating run to the Class C title this year is an unknown. And like the rest of the state,they were making a four-year commitment.

The armchair tough guys point to this dominating run as proof that they took the easy road. The fact is, the Leavitt Hornets have taken on challenges that would turn many of the grown-ups questioning their ambition into puddles.

Last year, they lost a friend and former teammate when 18-year-old Brandon MacDonald passed away suddenly during preseason.

“I really looked up to Brandon,” senior co-captain Scott Sleeper said. ” I really aspired to be like him because he gave it all he had on every single play.”

They put their hearts back together, rolled through the regular season, then had them shattered again when Belfast upset them on the last play of their Eastern B quarterfinal.

Self-pity wasn’t allowed. The Hornets were angry, mostly with themselves.

“I think we took for granted what the groups before us had done,” senior co-captain Levi Morin said. “When we lost to Belfast, it was kind of an eye-opener. The week after we lost, we had 60 guys in the weight room. We were angry the whole year, and now we can finally put that to rest.”

The notion that the Hornets had a cake walk through Western C and will feast on the competition even more in coming years needs to be put to rest, too. Yarmouth, Cape Elizabeth, Wells and Spruce Mountain fought back like the proud programs they are this year and next year they’ll be lining up to take on the state champions again.

“I think people do think it looks easy for us sometimes, and it’s not,” Hathaway said during our sunjournal.com web cast on Thursday. “The teams we play are good football teams. You look at Cape (Elizabeth), you look at Yarmouth, you look at Wells, you look at Spruce (Mountain), those are some teams with good coaches, good lines, good backs.”

The Leavitt Hornets know exactly what a challenge is, and they spent the past 15 months redefining what it means to take it head on, together.