AUBURN — Edward Little knew Lewiston wasn’t going to bow down in Thursday night’s KVAC finale between Twin City rivals. So anytime the Blue Devils threw a scare into them, the Red Eddies called upon their scary-good inside game.

James Philbrook (15 points, 13 rebounds) and Bo Leary (14 points, 11 rebounds) controlled the paint and Yusuf Iman (21 points) filled in the rest as EL pulled away in the fourth quarter for a 57-42 victory.

The Red Eddies finish the regular season 16-2, and will meet Brewer for the KVAC championship next Monday night at Cony High School. The Blue Devils close their season at 3-15, but not without first giving their hosts a few anxious moments.

“It’s a big rivalry game. You know they can’t go down easy,” said Iman, who picked up the Gordon “John” Gillette award as the game’s most valuable player. “We were expecting them to come out with a lot of fire and passion. We just talked about this being their championship game, coming into our gym on Senior Night, we had to take care of them.”

Lewiston actually came into EL’s gym ice cold, missing its first 13 shots and going without a field goal for the first nine minutes of the game. Yet they battled back to within four points midway through the second quarter on a 3-pointer by Tim Blais (12 points) and a pair of free throws by Ronnie Turner (eight points).

“That typifies how we played all year,” Lewiston coach Tim Farrar said. “We played with grit, we played with heart. Our effort allowed us to be  in games we never should have been in.”

EL overcame some of its own sloppiness (11 first-half turnovers) to build the lead back up to nine by halftime, but Lewiston quickly cut into the deficit on back-to-back 3-pointers by Blais that made it 22-19 with 5:26 left in the third quarter.

“Every time that we started to make a run and it was time you thought maybe we’d put the game away, Blais would come down and hit a jump shot or Turner would come down and drive and score,” EL coach Mike Adams said. “Credit goes to Lewiston. They played well and played hard.”

The Eddies regularly went to Philbrook or Leary in the low post, but both had trouble finishing inside until the game got tight. Iman found Philbrook on the low block for two points 18 seconds after the Devils pulled within three. That triggered a 13-5 EL run in which Philbrook and Leary combined to score 11 points from either the paint or the free throw line.

“That’s one of our main goals,” Philbrook said. “Work it in, work it out, get the shooters hot or us inside hot. The first half, I wasn’t doing so well kicking it back out, and then in the second half, we started to develop some game and it started to go our way.”

Shawn Ricker beat the buzzer with a long 3-pointer to get the Devils within eight heading into the fourth quarter. That’s when Iman took over, scoring 13 points, mostly by penetrating and drawing contact to get to the line.

Blais hit his last trey to make it 40-32 with 5:14 to go, but that was as close as Lewiston would get the rest of the way.  

“The word to describe our senior class, what they’ve given back to our program, is dignity,” Farrar said. “The stuff that they’ve been through in their four years of basketball at Lewiston is something you don’t wish on anybody. They’ve seen some of the darkest days of any program in the state and what they’ve restored to us is our dignity.”