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FAIRBANKS — Brent Sass and Dan Kaduce finished the Yukon Quest 20 minutes apart late Tuesday after a final run that could not have been more different.

Kaduce, of Chatanika, brought home a freight train going no slower than when the race started 10 days earlier in Whitehorse, Yukon.

Sass, of Fairbanks, mushed competitively for 970 miles but was prepared to walk the final 45 after his team stalled leaving Twin Bears Campground on Tuesday morning.

Sass lost three spots in the last six hours but got his team going just in time to march in ahead of Kaduce, taking seventh place before a chanting crowd of patient well-wishers at 11:18 p.m. Kaduce arrived at the finish line on the Chena River in downtown Fairbanks 20 minutes later with 10 loping dogs.

“I’ve never experienced it before, really,” Kaduce said of how his team maintained its speed. “I’ve come into the finish line at 7 miles per hour and (I was) at least as fast (Tuesday) as when we started.”

Kaduce traveled the final 45 miles in little more than five hours, and consistently posted the fastest run times during the second half of the race.

“I had a schedule written out, and I pretty much stayed exactly to it the whole time so I couldn’t be happier,” Kaduce said.

That schedule basically used an even run/rest ratio the first half, followed by taking one hour less rest per run after Dawson City.

“It was tough to sit back and watch the super-mega-racing going on,” Kaduce said. “But I could look at my piece of paper and say ‘Well, if I just stick to this, it is a fast run, so just try to do that.’”

Despite the strong second half, Kaduce only moved up one spot after leaving Dawson City. He finished just 2 1/2 hours out of fourth place after being 14 hours behind that position midway.

Perhaps Kaduce, 39, deserved a smooth final leg because last year he got hung up in overflow and had a dog run off for many hours during a miserable closing run from Braeburn to Whitehorse.

Meanwhile, Sass’ problems started late Monday, when he attempted a huge 115-mile run from Central to Twin Bears virtually without rest. His initial plan was to give his team a break after going over Rosebud Summit, which followed the even tougher Eagle Summit.

But when he reached the Chena Hot Springs area, where he used to operate a kennel at the resort, his team took off “like a rocket.”

“And I changed my mind about stopping. That’s where the mistake was made, right there,” Sass recounted while sipping a beer at his dog truck shortly after finishing.

Twenty hours after leaving Central, Sass’ team sagged into Twin Bears at 3 a.m. Tuesday and took its mandatory eight-hour break. But when Sass tried to leave, a dog named The Dude balked.

Enter mistake No. 2.

“I should have dropped him ... because he pulled back and stopped when we took off,” Sass said.

The Dude was a standout on Monday by leading the team over the two major summits.

“His race ended (Monday). He quit the race 40 miles from the finish line. He was fried,” Sass said.

Worse yet, that attitude quickly “spread like wildfire” and Sass had to run and walk in front of his team to near the Pleasant Valley Store. Frustrated and irate but trying to keep his cool, Sass then napped for a couple hours in his sled.

Sass only covered seven miles in the first six hours after leaving Twin Bears.

When Martin Buser came by and gave Sass a bag of fish and some advice, Sass hoped his team would be inspired to follow. “There wasn’t even a look at him,” he said.

Michelle Phillips cruised past shortly thereafter. “(My dogs) were totally oblivious,” he said.

Sass was almost ready to become the lead dog and start hiking.

“I would have walked the whole damn way if I would have had to,” he said. “I was going to finish no matter what.”

As a last-ditch effort, Sass ran up in front of the team, “something clicked” and his team started moving with The Dude stashed in the sled bag.

“We stopped once to snack and made it all the way,” Sass said, adding that his dogs were tired but their problem was mental.

Sass, 29, said the final run tainted what had been a good race.

“But I’m proud of what we did. The whole race was great and I made a lot of good decisions, but I made a couple bad ones and they bit me in the ass,” he said.

Finishing seventh earned Sass $9,000 but cost him $6,000 compared to fourth place.

“I would have been here in fourth place if I had just dropped (The Dude),” Sass said, his faced still battered after hitting a tree near Central on Sunday.

Despite the final day’s snafu, Sass finished 24 hours faster than in 2008.

Part of that was due to a good trail and favorable weather, but a lot of it can be attributed to a stronger run.

He dropped from fifth to seventh place, however, because of a much more competitive field this year.

When Sass stalled Monday, he said the scene reminded him of two years earlier, when he was unsuccessful in helping jump-start Richie Beattie of Two Rivers after his team stopped in North Pole 20 miles from the finish line.

Beattie said at the time he would have scratched instead of walking the last 20 miles. After camping overnight, however, Beattie got his team moving again.

Jamaican musher almost there

The only musher to finish on Wednesday was Warren Palfrey of Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, in ninth place at 9:50 a.m.

Normand Casavant, Mark Sleightholme, Colleen Robertia and Newton Marshall reached Two Rivers Checkpoint on Wednesday afternoon and should hit Fairbanks this morning with 10th- through 13th-place up for grabs.

Marshall, of Jamaica, can leave Twin Bears at 12:38 a.m. and is projected to finish as early as 6 a.m.

Yuka Honda of Nenana, Becca Moore of Willow and Iris Wood Sutton of Fairbanks remain at the back of the pack.

Honda, who scratched in her first two Quest attempts, arrived in Central at 3:25 p.m. with Eagle Summit looming.

Moore and Wood Sutton are traveling virtually together, having departed Circle City seven minutes apart Wednesday morning.

Kyla Boivin of Whitehorse became the eighth musher, and first woman, to scratch, dropping out Tuesday evening in Central.

Last year’s Red Lantern winner, Boivin was having a good run in 12th place at Dawson City before encountering unspecified trouble.