SKOWHEGAN — He hadn’t played a single varsity snap all season, so when Mt. Blue coach Gary Parlin called his name Friday night, junior exchange student Niklas Lutgen was a bit surprised.

“I heard (Parlin) say he wanted the other coaches to let me carry the ball a couple times,” Lutgen said. “I was a little bit prepared, but I was a bit nervous.”

Lutgen, who’d lent his talents to the JV squad as a kicker, had never carried the ball. After he entered the Cougars’ final regular-season contest on special teams for his first varsity play, Parlin sent the diminutive yet deceptively powerful player into the backfield.

Three carries later, Lutgen, who’d never played football before this season, put the exclamation point on a 47-6 Mt. Blue victory over Skowhegan by scoring on a 20-yard touchdown run that began as a run up the middle that he bounced to the outside.

“It was great, to hear everybody cheering for me on the sideline and all these varsity players telling me I did a good job,” Lutgen said. “It was just great.”

Also great for the Cougars, who bookended a pair of midseason losses with a pair of three-game winning streaks, was the news that Lawrence defeated Messalonskee on Friday. At 6-2, after that result, Parlin said he believed that the Cougars would earn a home playoff game.

Upon Parlin reading the score to his team, huddled at midfield after the win, the players erupted in cheers.

“Our goal from the beginning of the year was to earn a home playoff game,” Parlin said. “Once we lost those two games in the middle of the season to Bangor and Lawrence, we changed our goal to, ‘O.K., now we just need to make the playoffs.’ Once we beat Cony, we really felt we could win our last two games.”

They did so, and convincingly, scoring 35 points last week and then another 47 on Friday. This week, the Cougars spread the ball around even more than in last week’s contest.

As expected, with the first-team offense on the field, Eric Berry saw the bulk of the action as a running back for Mt. Blue. He finished with 91 yards on 17 carries and a pair of touchdowns. And as usual, Jordan Whitney put on a passing display, hooking up with wideout Cam Sennick for six completions, 107 yards and another pair of scores.

“They came in here, it was their senior night, their last game of the season and they had nothing to lose,” Sennick said. “We had everything to lose. We had to come out and win.”

Berry scored the visitors’ first touchdown on a one-yard plunge in the first quarter, and Sennick hauled in a 24-yard heave from Whitney early in the second to stretch the lead to 14-0.

Whitney connected with Sennick again just before halftime to run the Mt. Blue advantage to 20-0. In the third, Berry and Colten Miranda pounded the ball across the line.

The host Indians finally got on the board on the first play of the final stanza when Kaleb Austin bounced an inside run to the right sideline and scampered 41 yards.