OXFORD, Maine -- Is it good or bad for one of NASCAR’s brightest stars to win the biggest local race of the year?

Is it good for him to show up with his own team, lead half of the race and take away a $37,000 payday? Is that the best thing for local racing?

Is it the best thing for Oxford Plains Speedway, the TD Banknorth 250 or the Maine racing scene in general?

The standing ovation from the hearty souls in the grandstands who had absorbed more water than a lunch-counter sponge over the last two days said that it was.

If there’s one thing northern New Englanders appreciate, it’s an honest effort – especially when that effort is led by one of their own. Shane Wilson mired in obscurity when he was racing here in the northeast with Mike Batchelder, and the Vermonter never won his own Oxford 250.

So Harvick and Wilson, fast friends after winning more than a dozen Nationwide Series races together the last few years at Richard Childress Racing, won the ‘250' the old-fashioned way. By earning it.

They didn’t buy the best car out there. They didn’t have someone pay their way into a race and then stick them in a car, with a team, they had no experience with. They didn’t just show up here on Monday morning, take a provisional and turn laps.

Everything that Harvick and his team did said that it was serious about winning, even when the history of past Sprint Cup Series drivers in this race was spotty in the best of times. They treated the race with reverence, building their own car and making their own plans to compete.

"Let me tell you, this race, this is a big deal," Harvick said. "When you look back at the record books in this race, you see Harry Gant. You see Jeff Gordon. You see a lot of the short track racers – Junior Hanley – a lot of the guys who made short track racing what it is. Chuck Bown. I could sit here and go on and on with the guys who ran when it was North-South competition, when it was Busch racing."

Harvick is one of the last of a generation at the Cup level. Beyond contemporaries such as Kurt Busch and Carl Edwards, there are fewer and fewer new faces in NASCAR’s top reaches that had to race their way to the top by competing on local short tracks and tours.

Harvick, a Bakersfield, Calif., native did just that, and it’s clear he enjoyed that part of his life. He’s already said he won’t be back to the Oxford 250 to defend his title in 2009 – because he’ll be busy finding another short-track race somewhere to tackle, one that he’s never competed in.

Oxford Plains owner Bill Ryan wondered openly afterward if having the Cup team swoop in and win in dominating fashion was good for his race, for his facility.

Last year, the PASS North Series was criticized for a race at All-Star Speedway in Epping, N.H., a race that Kyle Busch apparently "won" after pitting illegally for tires. Busch was allowed to celebrate that win in front of angry and confused fans before the results were officially changed the next day and Mike Rowe was given the win.

But none of that controversy surrounded Harvick, who qualified through his heat race on his own merits and never drifted from the top-5 once getting there on Monday. The effort was on the up-and-up, and so were the results.

"We really didn’t have a clue what we were getting into until we got here, and we were close when we got here, but we weren’t anywhere around where we needed to be," said Harvick, who leaned on local racers like Ricky Rolfe for setup and track information. "We worked hard at it and had a lot of fun with it."

So, too, did the fans – who saw that while people can buy their way to the top in a lot of different places in life, you still can’t buy your way to the top in the Oxford 250.

Harvick worked his way to the top and picked up a popular win for doing so.