LISBON FALLS – Sitting in the dugout in the midst of Lisbon’s eight-run first inning, Mountain Valley coach Steve LaPointe turned to assistant coach Bob Laubauskas and told him he had a funny feeling they might be witnessing history Monday.

“I said, ‘You know, we’ve been in the MVC the past 20 years, and we’ve never been 10-runned,” said LaPointe. “I said ‘Boy, I don’t know about today.'”

LaPointe’s hunch turned out to be correct, although his team rallied to put off the inevitable until the sixth inning, when Lisbon tacked nine runs onto a 9-8 lead and slugged out an 18-8 win over their only Class B rivals in the MVC.

“It’s a really great feeling to actually beat a team like this,” Lisbon’s Tyler Brown said. “We got a little complacent with the lead and they started hitting the ball, and we finally had to wake up and realize what was going on.”

Lisbon pounded out 13 hits and took advantage of persistent wildness by Mountain Valley’s pitchers (13 walks, two wild pitches, one hit batter). Every Greyhound reached base at least twice, led five times each by Kyle Neagle (two hits, two errors, one walk) and Mike Unterkoefler (two hits, three walks). Marcus Bubar knocked in three runs, while Brown, Frank Angelico and Mat Hardison all drove in two apiece.

“They’re a good hitting team. They hit well one through nine,” LaPointe said. “You can’t walk 13 batters, either.”

“They owned the middle of the game and we did well in the beginning and end of the game,” Lisbon coach Randy Ridley said. “I don’t know what happened the last inning. We just came out and started ripping the ball all over the place. That’s a good step for the playoffs for this team.”

Both teams wrapped up the regular season at 11-3. The win gives the Greyhounds an outside shot at a first-round bye in next week’s Western B tournament. It at least guarantees a home prelim game. The loss may have knocked the Falcons out of contention for a bye.

It was a game of huge momentum swings. Mountain Valley starter Justin Staires didn’t register an out while walking three of the first five batters he faced on four pitches apiece. He left after yielding an RBI single to Unterkoefler and a bases loaded walk to Angelico.

Reliever Garrett McPherson hit David Yaede with the bases full and Hardison rapped a two-run single to make it 6-0. An RBI double by Bubar and an error scored another run to give Lisbon the 8-0 head start.

The Greyhounds looked poised to pour it on some more in the second when reliever Matt Laubauskas walked the bases full. Angelico got picked off of third by catcher Keith Brennick, however, and even though Laubauskas walked a fourth-straight batter, Lisbon left the second empty handed following two strikeouts.

That escape seemed to spark the Falcons. They touched Brown, who was making his second start since injuring his ankle against Monmouth early in the season, for five runs in the third on a two-run single by Cody McPherson and a three-run homer by Staires. Kyle Neagle relieved Brown and gave up three straight singles, but he wiggled out of the jam and maintained the three-run cushion by getting Garrett McPherson to tap into a 6-4-3 double play.

Laubauskas settled down and kept the Greyhounds within striking distance while the Falcons tied the game in the fifth on an error, a Garrett McPherson RBI single and a fielder’s choice that brought Brennick home.

Brown put Lisbon back in front to stay with a one-out RBI single in the fifth. The Falcons looked poised to seize the momentum again in the sixth when Staires came up representing the go-ahead run. Staires ran the count to 2-and-2 before fanning on a hanging breaking ball just above the letters from Neagle.

“That was a huge strikeout. That was a big momentum shift, right there,” Ridley said.

The Greyhounds didn’t want to take any more chances with the lead and never made an out against Falcon relievers Alex Gagnon and Cody McPherson in the sixth. Bubar had a two-run single, Alex Hall an RBI double, and Neagle, Brown and Angelico added RBI base hits before Andy Ouellette scored the game-clinching run on a wild pitch.

Staires, Gagnon, Garrett McPherson and Cody McPherson had two hits apiece for Mountain Valley.