KENTS HILL -- For Matthew Roy, the Red Sox World Series victories of 2004 and 2007 served as tidy bookends for his four years at Kents Hill School.

"Remember October 2004?" the Kents Hill senior from Readfield asked at the school's Saturday morning graduation ceremony. "I vividly remember being sent to bed in Wesleyan (a Kents Hill dormitory) as the Red Sox were beginning the greatest turn-around in history, taking on the dreaded New York Yankees."

The 76 Kents Hill students who were given diplomas at Saturday's ceremony were at the start of their high school years the fall when the Red Sox won their first World Series victory since 1918.

And they were preparing for the end of their high school years last fall, when the Red Sox captured another World Series victory.

Roy, Patrick McAleer and Huyette Spring, the three students chosen to address Kents Hill's graduating class, teachers, friends and family members on Saturday, brought up fond and quirky memories from their time at the 230-student boarding school.

They reflected on resisting homesickness, athletic and social excursions and the difficulties of rising from slumber for early-morning classes.

At the heart of their reflections were experiences that brought the 76 graduating students together as friends.

"Three weeks into school, while getting dressed for the day, I happen to look out of my window to see an alarm clock hurtling through the air," Spring, of New York, said of one early-morning experience. "I run into James and Henry's (two friends') room from whence the airborne alarm clock came to find both of them still fully asleep."

McAleer, of Orono, warned Maine drivers to look out for Kents Hill mini-buses that take the students from the Readfield campus to all reaches of the state.

"If you are driving down a highway and you see a Pope-mobile look-alike, shaking from side to side, guaranteed it's full of Kents Hill School classmates doubled over laughing, even during the most serious of conversations," McAleer said. "And it is that laughter which has brought us together."

Mercy Palamuleni, a Malawi native and a Kents Hill alumna from 2004, urged this year's graduates to continue learning regardless of the course they follow in life.

"If you have not noticed yet, your entire lives have been full of learning experiences," said Palamuleni, who earned a Bachelor's from Wake Forest University this spring and will being work on a Ph.D. in economics at Kansas State University in the fall.

"Classroom learning is part of our lives, but as humans we learn by our interactions with friends and the environments in which we live."

Palamuleni, who began her address with a greeting in her native tongue Chichewa, also encouraged the Kents Hill graduates to live by the school's core values, including compassion, courage, honesty, perseverance and responsibility.

"I have to tell you," she said, "since my life here on the hill these words have been the building blocks of my day-to-day life."

Headmaster Rist Bonnefond praised Kents Hill's international students for having "the courage to come here and risk everything."

Matthew Stone -- 623-3811, Ext. 435

mstone@centralmaine.com