Portland
Previously partnered with the New York Rangers, the ECHL hockey league’s Maine Mariners joined the Boston Bruins farm system. Now, Portland’s three professional sports teams — the Mariners, Sea Dogs, and Maine Celtics — are all Boston affiliates.
Winslow
Kay Spofford, a dietician in her early 60s, won the Maine Vaccine Sweepstakes — $896,809, or one dollar for everyone in the state who received at least one dose of COVID vaccine by the Fourth of July. Mainers had to be vaccinated to play the lottery, and 350,256 entered.
Augusta
The legislature passed a funding bill that mandates free breakfast and lunch for all students beginning in the 2022–2023 school year. Maine is just the second state to guarantee school meals, after California.
Acadia National Park
Yo-Yo Ma played pop-up shows at the park’s Jordan Pond House and Otter Point. The famed cellist also joined Wabanaki performers in a sunrise concert on the Schoodic Peninsula for visiting U.S. Department of the Interior secretary Deb Haaland.
Weld
The proliferation of unauthorized fires, litter, plant damage, and human and canine poop on much-trafficked Tumbledown Mountain led Maine’s Bureau of Parks and Lands to ban camping there.
Van Buren
The 195th Maine Army National Guard Band put on a transnational concert from a boat launch on the St. John River. Despite the US-Canada border still being closed, a Canadian audience gathered on the opposite shore, in the New Brunswick town of St. Leonard.