TOPSHAM — Friday’s Kennebec Valley Athletic Conference contest between Mt. Ararat and Lewiston High School featured a back-and-forth game with no clear decision on which team was going to win.

But the Blue Devils got the extra push in the seventh inning to take home the 5-4 victory.

“I thought we had them in the sixth inning when we had the bases loaded with nobody out,” Eagles head coach Bob Neron said when his team was trailing 4-2. “We were prime for a big inning. We haven’t had a big inning all year long, and I couldn’t have thought of a better place to have one. It’s a game of inches, and if that ball gets by that shortstop in the bottom of the sixth, this is probably a different outcome.”

Lewiston had taken that 4-2 lead into the sixth, but the Eagles started to put together a bit of a comeback. Chris Giroux pinch hit for Wyatt Card and drew a walk to start things off. Ryan Mello followed up with a base-knock to left to put two on with no one out and Nick Merrill loaded the bases with another walk.

By this point, Mt. Ararat (0-7) started to find its groove against Blue Devils (2-6) pitcher Austin Wing (five plus innings, five strikeouts and four walks). Nate Leslie saw only one strike cross the plate during his at bat, picking up the third walk of the inning and forcing in the Eagles’ third run to cut the deficit to one. Dylan Earl-Johnson, who went 2-for-4 on the day, smacked a hard ball to the left side and plated a run when Lewiston went with the force out at third.

“We played a little bit of shaky defense and that’s kind of been our memo all year,” Lewiston head coach Andrew Cessario said. “And walks. Walks keep me up at night. It jump-started that inning that they had when they scored their two runs to tie it. We overcame our mistakes, we did our job at the plate and executed with the baseball bat. We executed some bunt situations and manufactured runs.”

The Blue Devils hit the scoreboard first right out of the gate. Mike Wong reached on a fielding error and stole one of his three bases to get into scoring position. Broch Belanger pushed Wong to third with a single to right field, but the speedy shortstop scored on another single off the bat of Carter Chabot.

Mt. Ararat answered immediately, with an almost identical chain of events. Earl-Johnson laced an 0-1 pitch up the middle for a lead-off single and was safe on second on a fielding error during Cam Cox’s plate appearance. With runners on first and second, Kevin Carter dumped one into right field, scoring Earl-Johnson to tie the game at one.

Jacob O’Neill settled down over the next two innings, allowing just one hit and striking out one, but got a huge momentum boost when catching a Lewiston runner at first leaning a little too far toward second base for the second out of the frame. O’Neill finished with the no decision after working 3.2 innings. He fanned two batters and walked two, while giving up only three hits and two runs.

After tying the game in the fourth when Mt. Ararat took a 2-1 lead, the Blue Devils tacked on a run in both the fifth and the sixth to pull ahead, 4-2. Wong scored on a sacrifice fly to right in the fifth, while Kyle Ullrich doubled and scored two batters later on a ground out to second.

It was a brand new ball game in the top of the seventh with the score tied at four after the Eagles sixth inning. Wong helped the Blue Devils once more by drawing a lead-off walk, stealing second and scoring on a ground out to the pitcher after reaching third on a fielder’s choice play.

Brady Lusson was brought into the on the hill in the sixth inning to relieve Wing, and the right hander retired the final three hitters of the game to seal the win for the Blue Devils.

“Our bats are starting to come alive at the plate,” Cessario said. “We still have a lot of work to do. I preach to these guys every single day that I have a 30-minute rule. If you lose a game, you forget about it in 30 minutes, and if you win a game you enjoy it for 30 minutes. You come to work tomorrow and get better every single day.”

“(This game) proves to them that they can come back,” Neron said. “We’ve been down before and haven’t mounted any kind of a come back. You can tell it in the dugout that it was a different tone right from the first inning, on. They felt like they could play with these guys and stay with them. They work so darn hard and it’s going to turn, it’s going to change, it’s bound to happen. It has to.”