PORTLAND — You can’t score if you don’t shoot, and you can’t shoot if your opponent won’t let you.

A pair of stifling defenses combined to thwart a pair of struggling offenses, limiting offensive chances to near zero for much of the game as No. 5 Lewiston outlasted No. 4 Deering 3-0 in the teams’ Eastern Class A lacrosse quarterfinal Wednesday at Deering High School’s Memorial Field.

“We’ve allowed two goals now in two games,” Lewiston coach Bill Bodwell said, preferring to look more at his team’s positives after the playoff victory. “You can’t ask for better than that. They’ve been carrying us.”

The Blue Devils suffocated the Rams through most of the first half. Deering managed just four shots — two in each quarter — in the opening 24 minutes. Leading the charge was Cody Dussault. As a longstick defender, he had a hand in picking off nearly a dozen passes across the middle as Deering tried to put the pressure on Lewiston keeper Jesse Leeman.

“I felt like they just weren’t comfortable,” Dussault said. “Every time they had the ball, they kept trying to pass it to another guy. They never seemed to find room to shoot.”

And when the Rams did see an open pass to set up a shot, Lewiston quickly closed the lane.

“They were pretty much telegraphing their passes,” Dussault said. “We were just reading their eyes, and they weren’t putting much pressure on us.”

Leeman, meanwhile, when called upon, did his fair share, stopping seven shots to earn the rare shutout.

Led by one of the premier longstick defenders in Maine, Karl Rickett, the Deering defense did just as much to stifle the Blue Devils’ attack. Lewiston took just 21 shots toward keeper Nick Holton, 13 of which were on target. It took Lewiston nearly an entire quarter to find the back of the net.

“We possessed the ball pretty well today,” Lewiston midfielder Sam Cloutier said. “They were extending on us a lot more, and forcing us wide.”

Cloutier broke the deadlock with 2:11 to play in the opening quarter when he connected on a bounce shot after a feed from behind the cage by Elliott Chicoine found him alone about 15 yards out.

“It’s a bit different than at home,” Cloutier said of the synthetic surface at Memorial Field. “The ball bounces higher and doesn’t skip as much. It took a few shots to figure it out.”

Chris Rancourt added another Lewiston strike with six seconds to play in the first on a slick pass from Curtis Robinson.

Cloutier struck again 1:22 into the second.

Then, the defense took over for both squads.

“The defense played great, but they played a lot,” Deering coach Bob Rothbert said. “They beat us on the fundamentals. They beat us on ground balls. I’d say if there was a ground ball out there, there was a 90-percent chance they were going to come up with it.”

Despite the obvious disparity in possession, Deering held tough against a patient Lewiston offense.

“We had a few things that had the potential to work, but then we just kept losing the ball,” Rothbert said.

Lewiston advances to face top-seeded Portland in the Eastern Class A semifinal round, at Fitzpatrick Stadium in Portland on Saturday at 5:30 p.m. It’s a matchup to which the team has been looking forward since the Bulldogs edged the Devils, 12-10, in an early-season meeting.

“Defensively, hopefully we’ll have a good scheme against Portland,” Dussault said. “Offensively, we have two days to really step it up, and then try to take it to them this time. We wanted another crack at them, we wanted to end up on this side of the bracket so we’d have to go through them, so, we get our chance now.”