LISBON FALLS – Winthrop walked off Thompson Field Saturday the way it had so many other fields the previous eight weeks – victorious.

Taking advantage of excellent early field position and their typically stifling defense, the Ramblers completed their first perfect regular season since 2001 with a 24-6 victory over Lisbon in both teams’ regular-season finale.

The win clinched the No. 1 seed in the Campbell Conference playoffs. Winthrop (9-0) will host No. 4 Livermore Falls next week. Lisbon (7-2) finished as the third seed and will travel to Dixfield to face second-seeded Dirigo, which handed the Greyhounds their only previous loss in Week 1.

“We’ve been looking for this all season,” said senior running back/defensive back Jake Steele. “I know for me personally and some of the other seniors, we’ve been looking at this since sixth grade, and we finally got our team together. It feels real good.”

Given a short field to work with by Lisbon’s normally outstanding punting game, the Ramblers jumped out to a 21-0 first quarter lead. The Greyhounds wanted to kick away from Winthrop’s dangerous return men, Steele and Zach Farrington, but Nate Blackwell’s boots to the sideline took too sharp of an angle out of bounds.

“We didn’t want to punt to them. We’ve watched them return punts all year to beyond where you kicked from,” Lisbon coach Dick Mynahan said. “I told Nate anything beyond 10 yards is good as far as I’m concerned. The wind hurt him a little bit and they rushed him, too.”

Punts of six and nine yards and then a Lisbon fumble on consecutive drives set up Winthrop at the Greyhounds’ 37 once and their 46 twice.

The Ramblers needed just two plays to reach the end zone following the first two punts.

On the first score, Riley Cobb (seven carries, 79 yards) took a handoff at the 34, broke a tackle at the line, kicked out of another tackle, then juked another Greyhound as he bounced out toward the left sideline before reaching the end zone.

Steele followed that with a 43-yard TD run, breaking a tackle around the 40 before cutting back to his right and breaking free against an overpursuing defense.

“I got a good block in the middle from Skylar Whaley, and then Andy Smithgall and someone else had good blocks to seal the outside,” Steele said.

Smithgall recovered a fumble on Lisbon’s next series to set up Winthrop’s third touchdown, a 31-yard pass down the left sideline from Jordan Conant to Jason Raymond that gave the Ramblers a 21-0 lead with 45 seconds left in the first quarter.

Winthrop’s final scoring drive started at Lisbon’s 47. Runs by Joe Morey, Steele (11 carries, 92 yards), Cobb and Whaley got them down to the 9. Lisbon’s defense stiffened, so Farrington had to kick a 26-yard field goal to make it 24-0 with 2:08 left in the first half.

The Ramblers, who didn’t give up a point in the first half all season, limited Lisbon to just 58 total yards in the first half and held Blackwell, the Greyhounds’ leading rusher, to just three net yards rushing for the game. Lisbon had most of its success running Josh Cote (19 carries, 72 yards) up the gut.

“Defensively, I feel like our coaches prepared us real, real well,” Steele said. “We were looking at sets, and we were looking at their reads, and you almost kind of knew what was coming. They’ve got a fast quarterback in Blackwell. He’s a real good player and we didn’t want him to take over the game, so we tried to push the outside back in.”

“We wanted to contain the outside and the middle,” said senior defensive end Josh Confer. “They like to run the iso, and we contained that and the quarterback by having the ends crash and the linebackers and the tackles crashing the inside. We have some good defensive ends and some good linebackers, and it’s really hard to get to the outside with the boys we’ve got.”

With a little more breathing room behind it in the second half, Lisbon’s defense buckled down and held the Ramblers to just 44 total yards and one first down. Two key Kevin Hart sacks, a fumble and a drive that fizzled out at the Rambler 18 kept the Greyhounds at bay until late in the fourth quarter.

The Greyhounds could at least say they scored on Winthrop’s defense, which no team had done since Yarmouth in Week 2. Blackwell executed a perfect bootleg, rolled to his right, took a hit at the goal line and went head-over-heels into the end zone with 5:55 left in the game.