Milford girls basketball coach Mike Davidson holds up the Division II championship plaque after Saturday's title win over Oyster River at UNH's Lundholm Gym. (Photo by Joe Marchilena/NH-HsSports.com)

They received a police/fire escort Saturday on 101-A from the Milford line all the way through the Oval, with a couple of spins around it, and then to the high school.

And especially at the Oval, there were plenty of cheering fans celebrating the Milford High School girls basketball team’s Division II win over Oyster River.

“Milford does it right,” Spartans coach Mike Davidson said. “The number of people that were in that Oval cheering for us, oh my God. That’s a special community. That doesn’t happen everywhere. … A lifetime memory kind of thing.”

Especially since it almost seemed like a lifetime since the Spartans had won their last girls basketball title, when the late Jimmy Carter was president, in1979. And their last appearance in a state girls hoop final was in 1981, during the Regan administration.

But now the Spartans have the plaque. Davidson back in December said the team had two trophies it wanted to get: the one at holiday time – the Nashua Holiday Tournament – and the one in March. We all knew what that was, and the Spartans went 2 for 2.

But the seeds for this championship were planted six years ago, and it took a while for them to grow. That’s when Davidson was hired by the now retired Milford athletic director Marc Maurais to not only rebuild the school’s girls basketball program but save it from extinction.

That’s when Maurais told him, “You’ve got some girls who are going to be seniors, but I’m not sure they’re going to want to continue playing basketball.”

Thus the program was unsettled. Davidson was told he had some juniors and a couple of sophomores, “and that I could get things going in the right direction with those kids.”

That direction took a little while – like two winless seasons. That had to be brutal, but Davidson and the Spartans stayed the course.

And that course set the stage. That first year, there were sophomores named Bailey Johnson, Kate Hansen, and Addison Hopkins.

“They were really the ones who got us to where we are now, whatever number of years later,” Davidson said. In fact, Hansen came home from Utah to see her younger sister, Shea, play in Saturday’s championship game.

“When I saw her, she gave me a big hug, and I said ‘Kate, you started this’,” Davidson said. “You started this. The buildup to this started with your sophomore year.'”

And those first two years were 0-34, which Davidson said had to be hard to get players to want to come to practice every day at 3:30.

But after that second year, a parent said to Davidson, ‘You’re going to like what’s happening now. There’s lots of light at the end of the tunnel. You’ve got some eighth grade girls that are coming in next winter that are going to make a huge, huge impact right away.'”

That happened to be the four seniors that saw it through to a title: Avery Fuller, Ellianna Nassy, Claire Cote and Lulu Maguire.

Davidson said he entered those players in an off-season tournament in Bedford, and the coach said “You could just tell right away” that things would be different. Nassy in particular dominated the tournament. That, Davidson said, “sort of got my juices flowing.”

The Spartans the following season went 9-9, opening with a win over Plymouth in which Fuller scored 20 points, and made the tournament but had a predictable early exit. They went 14-4 the following season, won a prelim but lost to Pelham in the quarterfinals. Last year Maguire, who was rounding into possibly the team’s best player, suffered a tough knee injury in the Nashua Holiday tourney and the Spartans crawled to an 8-10 year.

This year, fueled by a sophomore transfer from Wilton, Lexi Bausha, plus Maguire’s return in late January to go with the smarts and clutch play of Cote and the length and talent of Nassy and Fuller, the road to a championship was paved.

But Davidson had to keep the group focused that after a sub-par 2024 season, 2025 would be better.

“Just stay the course,” he said. “We lost a lot of close games that 8-10 year. We were just one ingredient in pretty much every tough game. We were just missing that one little piece.”

The question was how long was it going to take Maguire to come back? There were a couple of complications, and every cautionary approach was used. When Maguire came back, she could sit on the outside and fire up 3’s, and was the team’s third best 3-point shooter. “She still had a big impact,” Davidson said. Ironically her first game was the regular season loss to Oyster River she hit three treys.

“We developed,” Davidson said, noting that when assistant and Wilton-Lyndeborough coaching legend Denny Claire asked Davidson if he had room for another player that turned out to be Bausha for the summer league. Davidson wanted to make sure he had enough players for summer ball, so he said sure. And Bausha ended up transferring to Milford for both athletic and academic reasons, and knew the Milford players already. Bausha had 21 points in Saturday’s win, 11 in the semis and will be a mainstay along with Shea Hansen next season.

The championship was on the players’ minds from Day One, the first day of practice on Dec. 2. “It was in their sights from Day One, but I kept having to tell them there’s a lot of work to do, there’s a lot of good teams out there. This doesn’t happen easily.”

No, it doesn’t – it was six years of hard work for an entire program.

“These four seniors, they play other sports, a couple of them do, but they’re basketball players,” Davidson said.

And along with everyone else on the roster, champions.