FALMOUTH — Believing in signs wasn’t a prerequisite to giving up on Andrew Slattery’s chances about a half hour into the final round of the Maine Amateur golf tournament Thursday.

Being a subscriber to logic and reason was sufficient. Even Slattery himself — on his way to being crowned champion for the first time at Woodlands Club — was starting to wonder.

Let’s take inventory.

As 36-hole leader, Slattery had honors at the 391-yard, par-4 first hole. He promptly hit his ball into the soft, spacious bunker whose wide-open mouth guards the right side of that fairway.

Calling it a fried egg lie is being generous. No sunny side was visible.

“There was this much of the ball showing,” Slattery said, holding his thumb and forefinger nearly together in the universal sign language for squat. “All I could do was chunk it out. I moved it enough so I could play it out with another shot. It was a brutal start. My worst nightmare last night was I would either hit it in the water or plug it in that bunker, and it happened. Making a five out of that was really good for me.”

The player who eventually raced Slattery neck-and-neck to the finish, Joe Walp, birdied the hole.

Two-shot lead, gone.

You could have found the latter result on the scorecard Slattery was supposed to keep for Walp, except it disappeared from Slattery’s possession, presumably somewhere between the second tee and green.

Oh, and Slattery also lost his range finder and tattooed his drive into the rough to the right of the cart path on the same hole.

“They never did find my range finder, but one of the pros here let me use his,” Slattery said. “I didn’t know where I was at that point. When you figure I had a plugged ball, a terrible drive to the second hole, lost my scorecard and my range finder, I was kind of a mess on 3. I can’t believe I got it back.”

The trauma was such that even hours later Slattery didn’t remember he chalked up a birdie at No. 3, a five-foot litmus test at the end of a 568-yard par-5.

Push the issue and Slattery will give himself more credit. Perhaps that forgetfulness wasn’t a product of nerves but the preternatural calm the pride of West Minot showed all week.

Sure, Walp shot 33 on the front nine. What of it? That’s what Slattery’s poker face conveyed after his could-have-been-much-worse 36.

“I hit the same clubs on every tee, every day,” Slattery said. “I didn’t get overly aggressive.”

The one exception might have been an erratic 3-wood that wound up in the woods off the 10th tee, resting atop a pile of mulch.

After seeking a ruling and praying for relief that never came, Slattery chose not to channel the no-guts, no-glory sensibilities of Phil Mickelson or Greg Norman and simply chipped onto the fairway.

When Walp missed a short birdie putt, a would-be disaster remained only a two-shot deficit.

“I just punched out, took my medicine, made a five and got out of there. That’s how you’ve got to play this course,” Slattery said. “You can’t try to get too much out of it. If you’re going to make a bogey, just make a bogey and move on.”

Six pars, two birdies and the hoisting of a crystal vase followed. Slattery’s score of 2-under 214 warded off Walp by one stroke.

The 25-year-old golf instructor with fewer years of competitive golf experience than most of the teenagers entered in the tournament — he gravitated to the game as a senior at Poland Regional High School — became Martindale Country Club’s first state champ since the great Ralph Noel, 33 years ago.

“Especially on a course this hard, you just try to hang in there and be patient,” Slattery said. “Not so much waiting for (Walp) to make a mistake, but waiting for the par-5s where I could make a couple of birdies. It was a long round of golf. After two, you’ve still got 16 holes left, and out here that’s a lot. That is a lot of golf. I played the way I played every round. I didn’t play scared.”