The start of the New Year offers an opportunity to look back on the stories that captured the attention of Valley News readers in 2023.

The list was compiled using analytics from our website, vnews.com. In other words, this is what you clicked on, Upper Valley.

As is often the case with most-read lists, it’s tinged with tragedy, crime and scandal. Mother Nature also makes an appearance.

As always, thanks for reading.

Longtime head football coach Buddy Teevens was a revered figured at Dartmouth College, where he starred as a player and led the program to its greatest heights as a coach.

Teevens died in September from injuries he sustained in March when he was struck by a pickup truck while riding a bicycle near his family’s vacation home in Florida.

Tributes poured in from the Upper Valley, a generation of former players and the broader football community, where Teevens was known as an innovator and as an early proponent of player safety. It was telling that players and colleagues celebrated Teevens for his compassion and generosity of spirit rather than any lessons imparted about the game of football or victories on the field.

A tiny private school in Quechee made national news last winter when its girls basketball team forfeited a VPA Division IV playoff game.

The MVCS Lady Eagles refused to play Long Trail because the Mountain Lions had a transgender girl on their roster.

The decision had serious repercussions for the school. It was booted from the Vermont Principals’ Association, the body that oversees high school athletics in Vermont, for failing to adhere to its inclusion policy. MVCS subsequently also was locked out of the state’s “school choice” tuition program.

A national conservative advocacy group has since spearheaded a lawsuit against the state on behalf of MVCS, demanding that the school’s religious views be accommodated. This season the school’s teams are competing in the New England Association of Christian Schools.

Editor’s note: This is a reprint of our third most read story of the year, in its entirety, as published on Oct. 10.

WEST LEBANON — Police recovered the body of a woman from a vehicle at shopping plaza in West Lebanon on Monday afternoon in what authorities characterized as an “untimely death” that did not present a danger to the public.

“We were called at 2:30 about a deceased body in a vehicle near Chili’s in the Target plaza,” Lebanon Police Chief Phil Roberts told the Valley News. “An investigation revealed no suspicious activity.”

The Monday afternoon scene attracted social media attention due to its high-visibility public location — one of the busiest spots along the heavily trafficked Route 12A shopping corridor. Police erected a tent around the vehicle as they conducted the investigation and recovery.

Roberts said the tent and other measures to obscure the vehicle were done to provide privacy for “family members who were at the scene” and to allow officers to conduct their work unimpeded.

The identity of the deceased woman was not made public by police.

In May, Ahmir Braxton, a 19-year-old sophomore, was arrested by Lebanon police on charges that he was a suspect in at least two armed robberies in Colorado in February where nearly $250,000 was stolen. Braxton was extradited to Colorado in June to face charges.

But in September, word came that the charges against Braxton had been dropped, though prosecutors in the case declined to say why and court records in the case were sealed per Colorado law.

Braxton returned to the Upper Valley and was enrolled at Dartmouth for the fall semester.

“We’re just trying to get our life back on track right now,” Braxton’s mother said in an interview.

Reports have said climate change will bring more powerful storms to the region and this summer seemed to provide proof for that hypothesis.

A soggy June set the stage, and when over 2 inches of rain fell across the region on July 9 and 10, it triggered the worst flooding since 2011’s Tropical Storm Irene. Businesses and homeowners were displaced.

Months later, the FEMA-funded cleanup in many communities is still ongoing.

This story came to us from our colleagues at Seven Days, a weekly publication in Burlington.

It detailed the strange tale of Justin Campbell, who served as principal at Hanover High until leaving in 2020 for a job at Middlebury Union High School in Middlebury, Vt.

In January, Campbell abruptly resigned midway through his third year in Middlebury after an investigation substantiated a parent’s claims that Campbell had falsified student interviews he supposedly conducted as part of an investigation into teen drinking at a prom-night party in 2021.

Campbell had used the investigation as a pretense to fire the parents, whom he accused of condoning the party, from their jobs as volunteer coaches. Sensing something was off, the parents pushed back and an internal probe unraveled Campbell’s scheme.

This summer, Jim Kenyon brought us the story of Kieth Matte, the former assistant principal who left his job under unusual conditions.

A nondisclosure agreement prevents Matte from providing a detailed version of his side of the story, though he was clear that he left of his own accord and was not forced out due to misconduct. And the school administration has been typically tight-lipped about the situation, citing employee confidentiality.

The affable Matte, best known for his nearly two decades on the sidelines coaching the boys basketball team, disappeared from campus with months to go in the last school year. The community, and particularly students, were never offered any kind of explanation.

Matte just finished his first semester as principal at Groveton High School in Coos County.

Five people were found to be lying to police about the whereabouts of a 40-year-old man, whose body they had dumped in the woods.

The man’s mother reported him missing in March after he hadn’t been seen in two weeks.

Ultimately, police would learn that man had overdosed at a Newport home and that the occupants had allowed his body to lay in the house for days before dumping the man’s remains in the woods.

All five of the people charged in the case pleaded guilty to charges.

Trail Break in White River Junction raised some eyebrows — and generated some comments on social media — when it announced in October that the restaurant was a “victim of its own success” and planned to close at the end of November to avoid employee burnout.

The plan is to reopen in Quechee in the spring as a seasonal dine-in spot to allow more focus on the catering side of the business.

The restaurant ended up remaining open through December, but was still set to close shop for good in White River Junction on New Year’s Eve.

In the story, owner Topher Lyons shared a common lament of Upper Valley employers: the difficulty of filling job openings.

His comments set off a spirited online debate about the work environment at the restaurant, including a lengthy riposte from Lyons aimed at the restaurant’s critics.

The Valley News first reported on Chris Conant in the first week of January, but the events in this tragic story began unfolding in late 2022.

The 53-year-old Conant died on Dec. 17, 2022, after spending weeks in intensive care at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center.

Conant had been pummeled by 42-year-old Marcel Boucher is a dispute over a backpack. In September, Boucher pleaded guilty and was sentenced to three to seven years in prison.

“There is no way to express how this has utterly devastated me,” Conant’s mother, Carol Hanna, said at the sentencing hearing.