2026 March Madness of Maine Characters

A no-holds-barred battle of iconic Mainers, real and fictional alike!

Welcome, sports fans, to the first-ever and possibly never-to-be-repeated March Madness of Maine Characters!

32 iconic real and fictional Maine characters will face off in five rounds of heated competition to discover which Mainer reigns supreme. It’s time to fill out your bracket and make your predictions!

Wait - real AND fictional characters? Yup! Also characters dead and alive, human and non-human, and both massively famous and totally niche. The only commonality? They’re all Maine icons. Maine Character Athletic Association (MCAA) bylaws state that none of this has to make sense.

A little backstory. A couple years ago my partner Zach and I were in the car listening to Last Podcast on the Left’s annual March Madness of Murder & Mayhem episode, in which they pit various real and made-up bad guys against each other in a bracket. We immediately seized upon the idea that this would be an ideal format to replicate with Maine characters. It percolated for a long time. Lists were made. Matchups were debated. Many laughs were had.

Last weekend, however, Zach and I sat down and finally - after nearly two years of debate - crafted our bracket. It’s composed of iconic Maine characters of varying levels of actual power and intelligence. They’re matched up in a 32-team unseeded bracket, which starting today you can fill out - here’s a link to a plain bracket. I would love to have this be an interactive thing you could fill out right here in this post, but Substack doesn’t allow you to embed most things and there aren’t any good bracket generators out there anyway. So we’ll do it the old fashioned way!

Don’t think too much about the specifics when you’re filling out your bracket. Go off vibes, for the most part. Or take it super literally! We’re having fun here, people. Remember: It’s not supposed to make sense. In fact, it wouldn’t be any fun if it made sense.

This may be a one-time event. Or, maybe we’ll do it again next year with some new characters mixed in. I’ll update readers on winners - decided by votes from you all - in a This Week’s Haul posts starting next week, March 12. First-round brackets must be submitted by March 11.

OK, folks: it’s time to meet your Tremendous Thirty-Two! Questions? Please submit them to MCAA co-commissioner Emily Burnham by responding to this email or commenting on this post.

These two Maine legal heavyweights are both concerned with getting one thing: justice, whether it’s for the many, many (suspiciously many) murdered residents of Cabot Cove as seen on “Murder, She Wrote”, or the many injured victims of accidents in Maine. Jessica Fletcher possesses uncanny skills at solving crimes and being beloved by literally everyone in town, while Joe Bornstein can get you the compensation you deserve, and, as we know, means business.

Sal, from the iconic Robert McCloskey book “Blueberries for Sal,” will face off against Bananas T. Bear, the UMaine athletic mascot, who in a shocking turn of events is actually competing as a tag team. Competing will be both the actual live bear that UMaine had as its mascot well into the 1960s, and a hungover college student in a bear costume. Our two Bananas certainly outmatch Sal in brawn and may likely kuplink, kuplank, kuplunk her into the stratosphere, but this three-year-old child has something they don’t: a bucket.

Reptile on reptile action! From the sea, Cassie, the Casco Bay sea monster, ancient cryptid plying the waters off Portland. Spotted only a handful of times over the centuries by sailors, and which reportedly has a very long neck and swims at very high speeds. From the land, Wessie, a big ass snake that presumably still roams the woods in Westbrook. How do we know that? They found its big ass shed skin.

The battle of the 1990s Maine sports legends! In this corner, Joey Gamache, a championship featherweight and lightweight boxer from Lewiston and a local hero to a generation of Mainers - especially kids of Franco-American descent. And in our starting lineup is Ricky Craven, the pride of Newburgh, a race-winning NASCAR driver who last year bought Speedway 95 in Hermon. Both were icons to 90s kids in Maine.

According to DC Comics, Aquaman is the son of Maine lighthouse keeper Tom Curry, who had a fling with an Atlantean and then raised their son in Maine - therefore, Aquaman is a Mainer. It’s only fair that he should go up against someone who is also underwater, and that’s none other than General Ramius from “The Hunt for Red October,” who will be competing while inside Red October, a nuclear submarine. Yes, we know Ramius is Soviet - but he defected to the U.S. And as we all know, Red October was last seen in the Penobscot River. It counts, dammit! Один пинг! [One Ping!]

It’s the Battle of the Eyepatches! Captain Nick was the sea captain mascot of Bangor restaurant Captain Nick’s, a seafood joint on outer Union Street that is mostly remembered for its absolutely incredible commercial jingle in the 1980s, which has been a vocal stim in the Burnham-Robbins household for all of our 18 years together. Does Captain Nick actually have an eyepatch? No, but we choose to believe he does. Meanwhile, Dick Curless was a badass country star from Maine, who certainly DID have an eyepatch, and who sang one of the coolest, darkest country songs of all time, “A Tombstone Every Mile.”

Yeah, Pennywise may be an interdimensional demigod who literally brutally murders and eats the children of Derry, Maine, but the Bucksport Witch can attack from beyond the grave and is powered by centuries of female rage after being put to death for “being a witch.” We think this is absolutely a fair fight.

See, the thing about this pairing is that these are both military guys. Hawkeye from “M*A*S*H*” is an iconoclastic army surgeon in the Korean War, originally from Crabapple Cove, Maine. Joshua Chamberlain, of course, is a Civil War hero (the Lion of the Round Top!) and later Maine governor - ironically, Hawkeye could have fixed up Chamberlain’s wartime wounds, which plagued him all his life. Hawkeye is excellent at surgery and drinking whiskey. Chamberlain, though: BAYONETS!

Basically, this is Maine accent v. Maine accent. Bert & I, the two old Maine fishermen who trade folksy stories in Marshall Dodge and Robert Bryan’s famed recordings and books, go up against the Marden’s Lady, Birdie Googins, who for many years waxed poetic - in a thick Maine accent - in commercials for Marden’s. Who’s got the thickah accent? This’ll be a wicked pissah of wallop, ayuh.

This matchup is based purely on vibes. We can picture the Moxie Man selling the delicious nerve tonic that is Moxie from a soda fountain in downtown Bangor, while outside, Public Enemy No. 1, gangster Al Brady, gets gunned down by G-Men on Central Street. They both share a certain early 20th century je ne sais quoi.

So Slugger the Sea Dog, the mascot of the Portland Sea Dogs, is basically a dog-seal hybrid, right? Not going to get into how that works genetically, but he’ll be competing against Andre the Seal, the actual seal who befriended Rockland resident Harry Goodridge and was a familiar presence in the harbor between 1961 and 1986. Slugger has opposable thumbs, somehow, and carries a baseball bat - but Andre has endurance, having swum between the New England Aquarium in Boston and Rockport every summer for years.

The heartbreaker. Brother against brother. Giant man vs. giant ox. The inevitable matchup. Tears will be shed. Giant flapjacks will be eaten. To borrow from the bard, Bruce Dickinson and his Maidens Iron, “The bugle sounds, the charge begins… But on this battlefield, no one wins.”

They didn’t ask for these powers. And yet, these two Maine anti-heroes have them: Carrie White, a teenage outcast with terrifying powers of tele- and pyro-kinesis, and Barnabas Collins, a vampire with superhuman strength and speed and the ability to shapeshift and teleport. In the end, all they want is love.

The tiniest, cutest matchup! Charlotte, the wise, kind barn spider. The Bangor Savings Christmas Kittens, the fuzzy little agents of chaos. This is arguably the most savage match-up if it weren’t so gosh darn adorable.

Here’s the thing: these are both children who were killed and resurrected, in a way. Casper, a boy who died from pneumonia and came back as a cute lil ghost and according to the 1995 movie, is from Maine. Gage Creed, brought back to life by the spirit of a Wendigo that haunts the titular Pet Sematary. We believe that the spirit of friendship (pun intended) may be the key factor in this matchup.

An immovable object meets an unsinkable legend. Yes, we concede that a full-grown moose will have every possible advantage in this one. It’s believed by some people, however, that lobsters may in fact have a form of biological immortality. Does this mean the lobster could sustain great damage, heal, and go on to live forever? Technically, no. Scientifically, also no. Will we ignore science in the name of entertainment? Yes.