SOUTH PARIS – Not having seen Skowhegan play this season, Oxford Hills southpaw Tucker Hill stuck to the basics of pitching Wednesday.

Hill scattered seven hits while going the distance as the eighth-seeded Vikings topped No. 9 Skowhegan, 5-3, in the Eastern Class A baseball preliminaries.

Mixing his fastball and curve effectively, Hill struck out seven and didn’t walk a batter. He consistently got ahead of hitters, painted both corners of the plate and kept the ball down.

“Yeah, except for that one pitch,” Hill said.

That one pitch was a first-pitch fastball to Indians’ cleanup hitter John Little in the top of the fourth that Little tagged for a solo home run to left field. But the Vikings answered with three runs in the bottom of the frame to take the lead for good.

“It was pretty much how I’ve been attacking every other team – fastball, curve ball,” said Hill, who improved to 6-0 on the season. “It was kind of hard to adjust because we haven’t seen them before and didn’t know what to expect, really.”

“He kept us off-balance and spotted the ball well,” Skowhegan coach Rick York said. “He made that one big mistake to Little, but all in all, I think that home run pretty much woke up the Vikings.”

Skowhegan’s Cody Vigue held the Vikes hitless his first time through the order, fanning five through the first three innings. But he also had three walks, and it was a leadoff walk to Cody Hadley that started the trouble in the bottom of the fourth.

Alex Newton followed the walk with a gap shot to right-center for a double that scored Hadley. Andrew Keniston then dropped a pop fly in no-man’s land near the left field line to send Newton home and put Oxford Hills in front.

Keniston stole second, beat Vigue’s throw to third on Ethan Davidson’s bunt, then scored to make it 3-1 on Hill’s sacrifice fly. The Vikings (11-6), who were limited to just four hits, added a pair of insurance runs in the fifth on Matt Verrier’s two-run single.

“We hit when we had to hit,” Oxford Hills coach Shane Slicer said. “Just to get on the board early there was big. They executed well defensively. We tried things. We tried to steal and got thrown out tons of times (six times in eight attempts), but it was nice that we got the lead so we didn’t have to just sit back. We could try some things and put a little pressure on them.”

The Indians (9-8) pulled back within two in the sixth. Alec Hayden followed a one-out error and a single with an RBI single. Cody Williamson scored on Marcus Morin’s ground out. Hill stranded the tying runs on base by catching Josh Falloon looking, then finished the Indians off with a 1-2-3 seventh.

Oxford Hills will face another KVAC North team in the the quarterfinals, top-seeded Messalonskee. First pitch is at 4 p.m. Thursday in Oakland.

“We’re playing well. I don’t think that it really matters (that the two teams haven’t faced each other),” Slicer said. “They might hit the ball better than what we’ve seen lately, but we went on a run when we had to face EL and Cony and they hit the ball pretty well. If we’re confident and stay in the game, we’ve got a chance. They’re ranked No. 1 for a reason.”