I’ve covered a lot of upsets and a lot of fantastic finishes in my lucky 13 years in the Sun Journal toy department. I’ve never seen more stunned faces than I found on the Leavitt sideline after Belfast shocked the Hornets in last week’s Pine Tree Conference Class B quarterfinal.

About 35 miles north, the only thing separating the shocked visages at Libby Field from the looks of relief colleague Kalle Oakes saw at Kemp Field was Bradley Jackson’s hand, which tipped away a two-point conversion pass attempt in the waning stages of a 14-13 nail-biter over Mount Desert Island.

Top-seeded Mt. Blue’s escape from eighth-ranked MDI, second-seeded Leavitt’s 20-17 loss to No. 7 Belfast, and No. 6 Waterville’s 25-17 upset over No. 3 Hampden sent shock waves not only through Eastern Class B but the state.

The Hornets and Cougars have been in just about everyone’s high school football top 10 all season long, and a rematch of last year’s unforgettable PTC championship game seemed a foregone conclusion. If anyone was going to prevent that from happening, a lot of people figured Hampden would be the foil.

Belfast brought down the Hornets with a good game plan and opportunistic offense and defense. Leavitt helped out by playing much of the game without the sense of urgency playoff games require. Throw in a couple of key injuries on the Leavitt side and you’ve got yourself enough of the ingredients to get an upset cooking.

All the Lions had to do was mix the ingredients and set the timer and temperature correctly. They hung around with the Hornets for 45 minutes and waited for their opening, then made the most of it when it came with a little over three minutes left. Quarterback Zach Collier calmly drove them down the field and senior running back Carl Dodge pulled the upset from the oven just as the timer went off, diving across the goal line with no time left.

It was a classic example of what makes high school football so compelling. You get plenty of fluke upsets in other sports. But playoff upsets are quite rare in football. Even with the short season, the cream usually rises to the top early in the fall. Not that football is necessarily predictable, but teams usually find their level by October, and they rarely deviate from that level for the rest of the season.

Belfast never came close to looking like a No. 7 seed Friday night, even when it found itself down eight points early or nine points at halftime. You can go a long way in high school athletics on belief alone. And you can fall a long way simply because of overconfidence.

That’s not an indictment of Leavitt. The one thing that keeps high school football from becoming as predictable as the NBA is it’s virtually impossible to predict how high school kids will react to pressure, how prepared they are for the spike in intensity when the schedule shifts from the regular season to the playoffs. Even a team that has as strong of a playoff pedigree as Leavitt isn’t immune.

If anything, Hampden’s dismissal and Mt. Blue’s near-removal from the playoffs proved that what happened in Turner on Friday night wasn’t a fluke. Waterville and MDI both had excellent game plans to slay their giants, too. Whether the players felt they had nothing to lose or complete confidence in their game plan, I wasn’t there so I can’t say. I guarantee you, though, that they executed those game plans to a virtual T (pun intended in MDI’s case).

Folks in Turner, Hampden and Farmington can claim all they want that their hometown team just had an off night, but it would be a pretty big coincidence that those three nights just happened to occur on October 26, 2012, and the three road teams just happened to be ready to rise to the occasion.

Mt. Blue is the luckiest of the three, of course, because it lived to fight another day. Judging by their post-game quotes, the Cougars knew how lucky they were. The Farmington faithful can take comfort in that. If the Cougars lacked focus or a sense of urgency last Friday, they won’t be lacking those this Friday, when they encounter a Gardiner team that nearly pulled off its own upset six weeks ago.

But if Gardiner does leave Kemp Field with the shocker MDI came so close to pulling off, it will be because the Tigers earned it. Same goes for any other team that goes on the road this weekend and extends its season.