LEWISTON — It took four tries over a span of 13 months, but Lewiston finally vanquished its demon in boys’ lacrosse Saturday.

And the Blue Devils did it in style.

Curtis Robinson netted five goals, Sam Cloutier added four more and the Lewiston defense held Portland to three goals in each half as the Blue Devils downed the Bulldogs 15-6 in the teams’ Eastern Class A semifinal at Don Roux Field.

“It’s a big monkey off our back,” Lewiston coach Bill Bodwell said. “When I saw them in the pairings, Coach Begonia is a good coach, Caleb Kenney is one of the best players I’ve ever coached against, and you just never know what’s going to happen … But I think the boys played really well.”

“That’s kind of been the story of our year, we’ve come out hard in a lot of games and then we fall off a bit,” Portland coach Eric Begonia said. “I don’t know that it was anything we did wrong, necessarily but a lot of what (Lewiston) did right, to be honest. They’re a talented team, top to bottom.”

Three times in the previous 13 months, the same teams met, and in each game the result was a Portland victory. This year, that margin was as small as it gets, a 9-8 overtime win during which the Bulldogs’ defense frustrated the Lewiston offense with a new-look zone.

“That was the first time we’d seen zone all year, and our offense was all over the place and we had no idea what we were doing,” Cloutier said.

Saturday, there were no surprises.

“They came out in man-to-man (Saturday) and they were extending on us a little bit,” Cloutier said. “Coach decided to have us work the ball behind the net a little bit, and that worked out real well for us.”

On defense, Lewiston has become stronger as the season has progressed. The Devils allowed only 49 goals in 12 regular-season games, the most being the nine they allowed to Portland the first time around.

“We got a scare in the first quarter, but after that we calmed down,” Lewiston defender Cody Dussault said. “We settled down and did what we know how to do. We were jittery at first, we weren’t talking. It always seems to take us a couple minutes to settle down and get the ‘D’ going.”

Like in previous meetings, though, Portland bolted out to an early lead when Caleb Kenney and Bronson Guimond scored in the first three minutes to open up a 2-0 advantage.

That appeared to awaken the Blue Devils’ offense, which made a slight shift early with a pair of key players.

“(Cloutier and Robinson) and both very good lacrosse players,” Bodwell said. “It’s something we’ve been kind of working on in practice. It wasn’t something we were necessarily going to do as much as we ended up doing it, but it seemed to work, so we stuck with it.”

Lewiston rattled off nine goals to one for the Bulldogs the rest of the first half, including three from Robinson and two from Cloutier, to take a 9-3 advantage into the half.

A quick start in the second half for the Blue Devils frustrated the Portland players, and they started to spend more time a player down, allowing Lewiston to move the ball at will and kill the clock effectively.

“We were in the penalty box way too much, we had some senior leadership that lost some composure a little bit and that had some trickle-down effects,” Begonia said. “They dominated possessions, moved the ball really well and they played great ‘D.'”

The lead increased to 12-4 in the third quarter, and the Devils outscored the Bulldogs 3-2 in the final frame to cap the scoring.

Lewiston advances to the Eastern Class A final, set for Wednesday at 7 p.m., against Deering, which defeated Messalonskee 8-6 earlier Saturday.