A new season is fast approaching with the start of preseason practices less than a month away, but first comes a final punctuation point on the 2017 campaign when the top seniors from last fall clash Saturday in the 29th annual Maine Shrine Lobster Bowl Classic, which benefits the Shriners Hospitals for Children of North America, at Hill Stadium on the campus of Thornton Academy in Saco.

The Foxcroft Youth Track program took part in a USATF Maine Group D meet on July 19 at the Brewer Community School.

Bissell Brothers, among the most popular of Portland-based craft breweries, has opened its long-awaited expansion in Milo. The new brewery, dubbed Bissell Brothers Three Rivers, opened Saturday, July 14 at 157 Elm Street, featuring food from Dover-Foxcroft-based Spruce Mill Farm & Kitchen, and eight taps featuring a rotating array of Bissell Brothers brews, including two Milo-only beers: Waveform, a wild IPA, and Square 3, a barrel-aged saison.

A hiker who was rescued out from the Appalachian Trail two weeks ago after falling ill was carried out again Tuesday, July 17 after another bout of sickness.

I’ve seen a few Allagash Wilderness Waterway canoe trips get cut short because people were ill prepared for black flies. A couple years ago, we had two young women that started their trip at Chamberlain Bridge who were desperate to get out of the waterway by the time they got to Churchill Dam.

Early in its existence the Dexter Historical Society received a donation of negatives and photos from Bert Lincoln Call, a photographer in Dexter from 1886 until the early 1940s. Call's stock-in-trade was portraiture of local citizens, but his passion was for the woods, lakes and rivers of northern Maine which he visited annually.

As part of its Community Care Program, Maine Highlands Federal Credit Union recently presented a donation to the Valley Grange of Guilford. Employees contributed based on their “dress down” Fridays with the proceeds being distributed to local community organizations.

Enough already. The media — no monolith, mind you — is not the enemy. Sure, individual reporters make mistakes, bias occasionally slips in, facts get mangled, and spin proves effective. But by and large — and with the exception of some elements of Fox News — reporters are operating in good faith.

Dexter Regional High School has released the honor roll for the fourth quarter of the 2017-18 academic year.

Before I moved to Sangerville 44 years ago. I worked as a custodian in a K-6 grade school and then I went and worked in a 7-8 grade school. In both schools I saw some very sad and depressed students. The younger children did not understand why their mother or father was not coming home anymore and the older boys and girls became very angry and some needed anger management. Children are the biggest losers. Very sad.